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THE 



Scottish Philosophy, 



JSiograpJjical, (Expositors, Critical, 



FROM HUTCHESON TO HAMILTON. 



BY 



JAMES McCOSH, LL.D., D.D., 

PRESIDENT OF THE COLLEGE OF NEW JERSEY, PRINCETON. 






M 



NEW YORK: 

ROBERT CARTER AND BROTHERS, 

530 Broadway. 

IS/5. 



v 



•:■' 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by 

ROBERT CARTER AND BROTHERS, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



Cambridge : 
Press of John Wilson and Son. 



/ 



//37 



PREFATORY NOTE. 



This work has been with me a labor of love. The 
gathering of materials for it, and the writing of it, as 
carrying me into what I feel to be interesting scenes, 
have afforded me great pleasure, which is the only 
reward I am likely to get. I publish it, as the last, and 
to me the only remaining, means of testifying my regard 
for my country — loved all the more because I am now 
far from it — and my country's philosophy, which has 
been the means of stimulating thought in so many of 
Scotland's sons. 

The English-speaking public, British and American, 
has of late been listening to divers forms of philosophy, 
— to Coleridge, to Kant, to Cousin, to Hegel, to Comte, 
to Berkeley, — -and is now inclined to a materialistic 
psychology. Not finding permanent satisfaction in any 
of these, it is surely possible that it may grant a hear- 
ing to the sober philosophy of Scotland. 

M. Cousin has remarked that the philosophy of Scot- 
land is part of the history of the country. I have 
treated it as such ; and I claim to have one qualification 
for the work : I am in thorough sympathy with the 
characteristic sentiments of my native land. I have 
farther tried to make my work a contribution to what 



iv PREFATORY NOTE. 

may be regarded as a new department of science, the 
history of thought, which is quite as important as the 
history of wars, of commerce, of literature, or of civili- 
zation. 

Some of these articles have appeared in the " North 
British Review," the " British and Foreign Evangelical 
Review," and the "Dublin University Magazine;" but 
the greater number are now given to the public for the 
first time, and all of them have been rewritten. 

J. McC 

Princeton, New Jersey, 
October, 1874. 



CONTENTS, 



Article Page 

1/ I. Characteristics of the School i 

i II. State of Scotland n 

l III. Precursors of the School 22 

I/IV. Shaftesbury, 1671-1713 29 

V. Gershom Carmichael, 1672-1729 36 

VI. Andrew Baxter, 1686-1750 42 

" VII. Francis Hutcheson, 1 694-1 746 49 

VIII. Religious Conflicts — Ralph Erskine 86 

IX. Archibald Campbell, died 1756 89 

X. Alexander Moncrieff, died 1761 90 

XI. Rise of the Aberdeen Branch 91 

XII. George Turnbull, 1698-1748 95 

XIII. David Fordyce, 1711-1751 106 

XIV. William Duncan, 17:7-1760 107 

v XV. John Stevenson, 1694-1775 107 

XVI. Sir John Pringle, 1707-1782 109 

XVII. Thomas Boston 109 

XVIII. David Dudgeon, 1706-1743 in 

J XIX. David Hume, 1711-1776 113 

XX. Books Advertised in "Scot's Magazine" ... 161 

* XXI. Adam Smith, 1723-1790 162 

1/ XXII. Henry Home (Lord Kames), 1696-1782 173 



vi CONTENTS. 

Article Page 

XXIII. American Philosophy — John Witherspoon, 1722- 

1794 183 

XXIV. James Balfour, 1705-1795 190 

XXV. Alexander Gerard, 1728-1795 191 v^ 

1/ XXVI. Thomas Reid, 1710-1796 192*/ 

XXVII. The Aberdeen Philosophical Society .... 227**^/ 

7 XXVIII. James Oswald, died 1793 229 

XXIX. James Beattie, 1735-1802 230 

XXX. George Campbell, 1719-1796 239 ,y 

XXXI. James Burnett (Lord Monboddo), 1714-1799 . . 245 

XXXII. Adam Ferguson, 1723-1816 255 

XXXIII. James Hutton, 1726-1797 261 

XXXIV. John Gregory, 1724-1773 263 • 

XXXV. James Gregory, 1 753-1821 264 

XXXVI. Alexander Crombie, i 760-1 842 265 

XXXVII. Archibald Arthur, 1774-1797 266 

XXXVIII. John Bruce, 1744-1826 267 

XXXIX. Review of the Century 267 

XL. Dugald Stewart, 1753-1828 275 

XLI. William Lawrence Brown, 1 755-1 830 .... 307 

XLII. Archibald Alison, 1757— 1839 3°8 

XLIII. George Jardine, 1742-1827 316 

XLIV. Thomas Brown, 1778-1820 317 

XLV. Francis Jeffrey, 1773-1850 337 

XLVI. Sir James Mackintosh, 1765-1832 346 

XLVII. Henry Lord Brougham, 1779- 1868 360 

XLVI 1 1. James Mylne, died 1839 364 

XLIX. John Young, 1781-1829 367 

L. ' William Cairns, 1 780-1 848 369 

LI. James Mill, 1773-1836 370 

LI I. John Ballantyne, 1 778-1 830 388 

LIII. Thomas Chalmers, 1780-1847 393 



CONTENTS. vii 

Article Page 

LIV. John Abercrombie, 1780-1844 406 

LV. David Welsh, 1 793-1 845 408 

LVI. John Wilson, 1785— 1853 410 

LVII. Sir William Hamilton, 1791-1856 415 

LVIII. The Metaphysics of the Future 454 



APPENDIX. 

I. MS. Letters of Francis Hutcheson 463 

II. Questions in the Philosophical Society of 

Aberdeen 467 

III. MSS. Papers by Reid 473 

Index 477 



THE SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY 



1. — CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SCHOOL. 

The Germans have histories without number of their philoso- 
phy from Kant to Hegel, with not a few historical reviews 
of the later speculations. The French, too, have numerous 
sketches of the philosophy of their country generally, and of 
individual systems, such as that of Descartes. It is no way 
to the credit of British thought, and least of all to that of the 
Scotch metaphysicians, that we have not in our language a his- 
tory of the Scottish school of philosophy. There are valuable 
notices of it, it is true, in Dugald Stewart's Historical Disserta- 
tion, and in his Eloges of Reid and Adam Smith ; but Stewart 
is far too dignified and general in his style to be able to give an 
articulate account of the special doctrines of the different mas- 
ters of the school, or a vivid picture of the times, with many of 
the marked characteristics of which he had no sympathy. The 
best history of the Scottish Philosophy is by a Frenchman, and 
has not been translated into English. We look on " Philoso- 
phic Ecossaise," the volume in which M. Cousin treats of the 
Scottish school, as containing upon the whole the most fault- 
less of all his historical disquisitions. In his other volumes he 
scarcely does justice to Locke, whom he always judges from 
the evil consequences which have flowed from his philosophy 
on the continent, and he is not able to wrestle successfully with 
the powerful logical intellect of Kant ; but he has a thorough 
appreciation of the excellencies of the Scottish metaphysicians, 
and, when he finds fault, his criticisms are always worthy of 
being considered. But it could not be expected of a foreigner, 



2 CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SCHOOL. [Art. i. 

that he should thoroughly comprehend the state of Scotland 
when its peculiar philosophy arose, nor be able to estimate its 
relation to the national character ; and the account given by 
M. Cousin is fragmentary, and critical rather than expository. 

The Scottish Philosophy possesses a unity, not only in the 
circumstance that its expounders have been Scotchmen, but 
also and more specially in its method, its doctrines, and its 
spirit. It is distinguished by very marked and decided feat- 
ures, which we may represent as determined by the bones 
rather than the flesh or muscles. 

I. It proceeds on the method of observation, professedly and 
really. In this respect it is different from nearly all the philos- 
ophies which went before, from many of those which were con- 
temporary, and from some of those which still linger among us. 
The method pursued in Eastern countries, in ancient Greece 
and Rome, in the scholastic times, and in the earlier ages of 
modern European speculation, had not been that of induction, 
either avowedly or truly. No doubt, speculators have been 
obliged in all ages and countries to make some use of facts, in 
the investigation both of mind and matter. But in the earlier 
theosophies, physiologies, and philosophies, they looked at the 
phenomena of nature merely as furnishing a starting-point to 
their systems, or a corroboration of them ; and their inquiries 
were conducted in the dogmatic, or deductive, or analytic man- 
ner, explaining phenomena by assumed principles, or bringing 
facts to support theories, or resolving the complexities of the 
universe by refined mental distinctions. This spirit had been 
banished from physical science, first, by the great realistic 
awakening of the sixteenth century ; then by the profound wis- 
dom and far-sighted sagacity of Bacon ; and, finally, by the 
discoveries of Newton and the establishment of the Royal Soci- 
ety of London. But it lingered for some ages longer in men- 
tal science, from which it has not even yet been finally expelled. 
Bacon had declared, that his method was applicable to all other 
sciences as well as to the investigation of the material universe. 
"Does any one doubt (rather than object)," says he, "whether 
we speak merely of natural philosophy or of other sciences also, 
such as logics, ethics, politics, as about to be perfected by our 
method ? " " We certainly," he replies, " understand all these 
things which have been referred to ; and like as the vulgar 



Art. i.] PROCEEDS BY OBSERVATION. 3 

logic, which regulates things by the syllogism, pertains not to 
the natural but all sciences, so ours, which proceeds by induc- 
tion, embraces them all. For thus we would form a history 
and tables concerning anger, fear, modesty, and the like, as also 
examples of civil affairs, not omitting the mental emotions of 
memory, composition, division, judgment, and the rest, just as 
we form such of heat and cold, of light, vegetation, and such 
like." Sir Isaac Newton had said in his Optics : " And if nat- 
ural philosophy in all its parts, by pursuing this method, shall 
at length be perfected, the bounds of moral philosophy will also 
be enlarged." But the employment of the method of induction 
in the study of the human mind was for ages slow, wavering, 
and uncertain. It has been asserted, that Descartes proceeded 
on the method of induction ; but the statement has been made 
by metaphysicians who have never correctly apprehended the 
mode of procedure recommended by Bacon. Descartes does 
indeed appeal to profound ideas, which may be regarded as 
mental facts ; but it is not by them to arrive at laws by a grad- 
ual generalization ; it is rather to employ them as foundation- 
stones of his structure, which is reared high above them by the 
joint dogmatic and deductive method, and on the geometric 
and not the inductive plan. It has been averred that Hobbes 
proceeded on the method of his friend Bacon ; but Hobbes no- 
where professes to do so : his doctrine of the origin of civil 
government is a mere theory, his system of the human mind 
and of morals is obtained by a very defective analysis, and, in 
fact, is mainly borrowed from Aristotle, whose profounder prin- 
ciples he was incapable of appreciating. It cannot be denied 
that Locke does proceed very largely in the way of observation ; 
but it is a curious circumstance that he nowhere professes to fol- 
low the method of induction ; and his great work may be sum- 
marily represented as an attempt to establish by internal facts 
the preconceived theory, that all our ideas are derived from sen- 
sation and reflection. To the Scottish school belongs the merit 
of being the first, avowedly and knowingly, to follow the induc- 
tive method, and to employ it systematically in psychological 
investigation. As the masters of the school were the first to 
adopt it, so they, and those who have borrowed from them, are 
almost the only persons who have studiously adhered to it. 
The school of Condillac in France, and its followers in England 



4 CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SCHOOL. [Art. i. 

and Germany, do indeed profess to attend to observation, but 
it is after the manner of the empiricists, described by Bacon as 
beginning with experience, but immediately abandoning it for 
premature hypotheses. It will be seen, as we advance, that 
Kant followed the critical and not the inductive method. 
Hutcheson and Turnbull, and especially Reid and Stewart, 
have the credit of announcing unambiguously, that the human 
mind is to be studied exclusively by the method of observation, 
and of consistently employing this mode of procedure in all 
their investigations. 

II. It employs self-consciousness as the instrument of obser- 
vation. It may thus be distinguished from some other schools 
with which it has been confounded. Bacon, we have seen, did 
believe in the applicability of his method to all the mental sci- 
ences. But he had no clear apprehension of the agency by 
which the observation is to be accomplished ; he supposed it 
to be by " the history and tables concerning anger, fear, mod- 
esty, the memory, composition, division, judgment, and the 
like." In respect of the means of observation, philosophy is 
greatly indebted to Descartes, who taught men, in studying the 
human mind, to seize on great internal ideas. The questions 
started by Locke, and his mode of settling them, tend towards 
the same issue ; he dwells fondly on reflection as the alone 
source of the ideas which we have of the workings of the human 
mind, and ever appeals to the internal sense as an arbiter in 
discussions as to the origin of ideas. But the Scottish phi- 
losophers took a step in advance of any of their predecessors, 
inasmuch as they professed to draw all the laws of mental phi- 
losophy — indeed, their whole systems — from the observations 
of consciousness. 

By this feature they are at once distinguished from those 
who would construct a science of the human mind from the ob- 
servation of the brain or nerves, or generally from animal phy- 
siology. Not indeed that the Scottish philosophy is required, 
by its manner or its principles, to reject the investigation of the 
functions of the bodily frame, as fitted to throw light on mental 
action. Certain of the masters of the school, such as Reid, 
Brown, and Hamilton, were well acquainted with physiology in 
its latest discoveries in their day, and carefully employed their 
knowledge to illustrate the operations of the human mind. 



Art. i.] PROCEEDS BY SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 5 

There is nothing in the method, or the spirit, or the cherished 
doctrines of the school tending to discountenance or disparage 
a painstaking experimental investigation of the parts of the 
bodily frame most intimately connected with mental action. 
Possibly the next great addition may be made to psychology, 
when internal observation of the thoughts and feelings, and ex- 
ternal observation of the brain and nerves and vital forces, are 
in circumstances to combine their lights. But in the days of 
the great masters of the Scottish school, physiology was not in a 
state, nor is it yet in a position, to furnish much aid in explain- 
ing mental phenomena. The instrument employed by them 
was the internal sense ; and they always maintained that it is 
only by it that we can reach an acquaintance with mind proper 
and its various operations, and that the knowledge acquired 
otherwise must ever be regarded as subordinate and subsidiary. 
They might have admitted that the occasion of the production, 
and the modifications of our mental states, could so far be in- 
fluenced by the cerebro-spinal mass, or the forces operating in 
it ; but they strenuously maintained that we can know what 
our perceptions, and judgments, and feelings, and wishes, and 
resolves, and moral appreciations are, not by the senses or the 
microscope, not by chemical analysis, or the estimation of the 
vital forces, but solely through our inward experience revealed 
by consciousness. 

But let us properly understand what the Scottish school in- 
tend when they maintain that a science of the human mind can 
be constructed only by immediate consciousness. They do not 
mean that the study of the mind can be prosecuted in no other 
way than by looking in for ever on the stream of thought as it 
flows on without interruption. The operation of introspection 
is felt to be irksome in the extreme if continued for any length 
of time, and will certainly be abandoned when thought is rapid 
of feeling is intense ; and those who trust to it exclusively are 
apt to fix their attention on a few favorite mental states, and 
omit many others no less characteristic of the human mind. 
He who would obtain an adequate and comprehensive view of 
our complex mental nature must not be satisfied with occa- 
sional glances at the workings of his own soul : he must take 
a survey of the thoughts and feelings of others so far as he can 
gather them from their deeds and from their words : from the 



6 CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SCHOOL. [Art. i. 

acts of mankind generally, and of individual men, women, and 
children ; from universal language as the expression of human 
cogitation and sentiment ; and from the commerce we hold 
with our fellow-men by conversation, by writing, or by books. 
Reid in particular is ever appealing to men's actions and lan- 
guage, as a proof that there must be certain principles, beliefs, 
and affections in the mind. Still this evidence ever carries us 
back to consciousness, as after all both the primary witness and 
the final judge of appeal ; as it is only by it, and by what has 
passed through our own minds, that we can come to discern and 
appreciate the feelings of our brother men. 1 

III. By the observations of consciousness, principles are 
reached which are prior to and independent of experience. 
This is another grand characteristic of the school, distinguish- 
ing it, on the one hand, from empiricism and sensationalism ; 
and, on the other hand, from the dogmatism and a priori specu- 
lation of all ages and countries. It agrees with the former in 
holding that we can construct a science of mind only by obser- 
vation, and out of the facts of experience ; but then it sepa- 
rates from them, inasmuch as it resolutely maintains that we 
can discover principles which are not the product of observation 
and experience, and which are in the very constitution of the 
mind, and have there the sanction of the Author of our nature. 
These are somewhat differently apprehended and described by 
the masters of the school, some taking a deeper and others a 
more superficial view of them. Hutcheson calls them senses, 
and finds them in the very constitution of the mind. Reid 
designates them principles of common sense, and represents 
them as being natural, original, and necessary. Stewart char- 
acterizes them as fundamental laws of human thought and 
belief. Brown makes them intuitions simple and original. 
Hamilton views them under a great many aspects, but seems 

1 Mr. Buckle, in his "History of Civilization," vol. ii., professes a deep ac- 
quaintance with the Scottish metaphysicians of last century, who are represented 
by him as proceeding in the deductive, and not in the inductive, method. He 
adds, that in Scotland "men have always been deductive." But Mr. B. was 
never able to understand the difference between the method of deduction on the 
one hand, and the method of induction with consciousness as the agent of obser- 
vation, on the other : the former derives consequences by reasoning from princi- 
ples, the latter reaches principles by internal observation. That his whole views 
on this subject were confused is evident, from the circumstance that he repre- 
sents women as proceeding (like Scotchmen) by deduction ! 



Art. i.] DISCOVERS INTUITIVE TRUTH. 7 

to contemplate them most frequently and fondly after the man- 
ner of Kant, as a priori forms or conditions. But whatever 
minor or major differences there may be in the fulness of their 
exposition, or in the favorite views which they individually 
prefer, all who are truly of the Scottish school agree in main- 
taining that there are laws, principles, or powers in the mind 
anterior to any reflex observation of them, and acting indepen- 
dently of the philosophers' classification or explanation of them. 
While the Scottish school thus far agrees with the rational and 
a priori systems, it differs from them most essentially, in refus- 
ing to admit any philosophic maxims except such laws or prin- 
ciples as can be shown by self -inspection to be in the very 
constitution of the mind. It has always looked with doubt, if 
not suspicion, on all purely abstract and rational discussions, 
such as that by which Samuel Clarke demonstrated the exist- 
ence of God ; and its adherents have commonly discounte- 
nanced or opposed all ambitious a priori systems, such as those 
which were reared in imposing forms in Germany in the end 
of last, and the beginning of the present, century. 

These three characters are found, in» a more or less decided 
form, in the works of the great masters of the school. I am not 
sure indeed whether they have been formally announced by 
all, nor whether they have always been consistently followed 
out. I allow that the relation of the three principles one to 
another, and their perfect congruity and consistency, have not 
always been clearly discerned or accurately expressed. In par- 
ticular, I am convinced that most of the Scottish metaphysi- 
cians have not clearly seen how it is that we must ever proceed 
in mental science by observation, while there are at the same 
time in the mind laws superior to and independent of observa- 
tion ; how it is that while there are a priori principles in the 
mind, it is yet true that we cannot construct a philosophy by a 
priori speculation. But with these explanations and deductions, 
it may be maintained that the characters specified are to be 
found, either announced or acted on, in the pages of all the 
writers of the school, from Hutcheson to Hamilton. Whenever 
they are discovered in the works of persons connected with 
Scotland, the writers are to be placed among the adherents of 
the school. Wherever there is the total absence of any one of 
them, we cannot allow the author a place in the fraternity. 



8 CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SCHOOL. [Art. I. 

The Scottish metaphysicians and moralists have left their 
impress on their own land, not only on the ministers of religion, 
and through them upon the body of the people, but also on the 
whole thinking mind of the country. The chairs of mental 
science in the Scottish colleges have had more influence than 
any others in germinating thought in the minds of Scottish 
youth, and in giving a permanent bias and direction to their 
intellectual growth. We have the express testimony of a suc- 
cession of illustrious men for more than a century, to the effect 
that it was Hutcheson, or Smith, or Reid, or Beattie, or Stew- 
art, or Jardine, or Mylne, or Brown, or Chalmers, or Wilson, or 
Hamilton, who first made them feel that they had a mind, and 
stimulated them to independent thought. We owe it to the 
lectures and writings of the professors of mental science, act- 
ing always along with the theological training and preaching 
of the country, that men of ability in Scotland have commonly 
been more distinguished by their tendency to inward reflection 
than inclination to sensuous observation. Nor is it to be omit- 
ted that the Scottish metaphysicians have written the English 
language, if not with absolute purity, yet with propriety and 
taste, — some of them, indeed, with elegance and eloquence, — 
and have thus helped to advance the literary cultivation of the 
country. All of them have not been men of learning in the 
technical sense of the term, but they have all been well informed 
in various branches of knowledge (it is to a Scottish meta- 
physician we owe the " Wealth of Nations ") ; several of them 
have had very accurate scholarship ; and the last great man 
among them was not surpassed in erudition by any scholar of 
his age. Nor has the influence of the Scottish philosophy been 
confined to its native soil. The Irish province of Ulster has 
felt it quite as much as Scotland, in consequence of so many 
youths from the north of Ireland having been educated at Glas- 
gow University. Though Scotch metaphysics are often spoken 
of with contempt in the southern part of Great Britain, yet 
they have had their share in fashioning the thought of England, 
and, in particular, did much good in preserving it, for two or 
three ages towards the end of last century and the beginning 
of this, from falling altogether into low materialistic and utili- 
tarian views ; and in this last age Mr. J. S. Mill got some of 
his views through his father from Hume, Stewart, and Brown, 



Art. i.] ITS MERITS. 9 

and an active philosophic school at Oxford has built on the 
foundation laid by Hamilton. The United States of America, 
especially the writers connected with the Presbyterian and 
Congregational Churches, have felt pleasure in acknowledging 
their obligations to the Scottish thinkers. It is a most inter- 
esting circumstance, that when the higher metaphysicians of 
France undertook, in the beginning of this century, the labori- 
ous work of throwing back the tide of materialism, scepticism, 
and atheism which had swept over the land, they called to their 
aid the sober and well-grounded philosophy of Scotland. Nor 
is it an unimportant fact in the history of philosophy, that the 
great German metaphysician, Emmanuel Kant, was roused, as 
he acknowledges, from his dogmatic slumbers by the scepticism 
of David Hume. 

But the great merit of the Scottish philosophy lies in the 
large body of truth which it has — if not discovered — at least 
settled on a foundation which can never be moved. It has 
added very considerably to our knowledge of the human mind, 
bringing out to view the characteristics of mental as distin- 
guished from material action ; throwing light on perception 
through the senses ; offering valuable observations on the intel- 
lectual powers, and on the association of ideas ; furnishing, if 
not ultimate, yet very useful provisional classifications of the 
mental faculties ; unfolding many of the peculiarities of man's 
moral and emotional nature, of his conscience, and of his taste 
for the beautiful ; resolving many complex mental phenomena 
into their elements ; throwing aside by its independent research 
a host of traditional errors which had been accumulating for 
ages ; and, above all, establishing certain primary truths as a 
foundation on which to rear other truths, and as a breakwater 
to resist the assaults of scepticism. 

In comparing it with other schools, we find that the tran- 
scendental speculators of Germany have started discussions 
which they cannot settle, and followed out their principles* to 
extravagant consequences, which are a reductio ad absurdum 
of the whole method on which they proceed. Again, the phys- 
iologists have failed to furnish any explanation of conscious- 
ness, of thought, of moral approbation, or of any other peculiar 
mental quality. Meanwhile, the philosophy of consciousness 
has co-ordinated many facts, ascertained many mental laws, 



10 CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SCHOOL. [Art. i. 

explained many curious phenomena of our inward experience, 
and established a body of intuitive truths. By its method of 
careful observation, and by it alone, can the problems agitated 
in the rival a priori schools be solved, so far as they can be 
solved by the human faculties. Whatever aid physiological 
research as it advances may furnish to psychology, it must 
always be by the study, not of the brain, and nerves, and vital 
forces, but of our conscious operations, that a philosophy of 
the human mind is to be constructed. Whether the Scottish 
philosophy is to proceed exclusively in its old method, and go 
on co-ordinating facts with ever-increasing care, and expressing 
them with greater and greater precision, or whether it is to 
borrow from other schools, — say to resolve in its own way the 
questions started by Schelling and Hegel, or to call in physiol- 
ogy to account for the rise of mental states, — it is at least desir- 
able that we should now have a combined view of what has 
been accomplished by the philosophy of consciousness. This 
is what is attempted in this work. 

It should be freely admitted that the Scottish school has not 
discovered all truth, nor even all discoverable truth, in philos- 
ophy ; that it does not pretend to have done so is one of its 
excellencies, proceeding from the propriety of its method and 
the modesty of its character. Among the writings of the Scot- 
tish school, it is only in those of Sir William Hamilton that we 
find some of the profoundest problems of philosophy, such as 
the conditions of human knowledge and the idea of the infinite 
discussed ; and the majority of the genuine adherents of the 
school are inclined to think that on these subjects his conclu- 
sions are too bare and negative, and that he has not reached 
the full truth. Reid and Stewart are ever telling us that they 
have obtained only partial glimpses of truth, and that a com- 
plete science of the human mind is to be achieved solely by 
a succession of inquirers prosecuting the investigation through 
a series of ages. Brown and Hamilton make greater preten- 
sions to success in erecting complete systems, but this is one 
of the defects of these great men, arising, as we shall see, from 
their departing from the genuine Scottish method, and adopt- 
ing, so far, other and continental modes of philosophizing, the 
one betaking himself to the empirical analysis of the French 
sensational school, and the other adopting the critical method 



Art. ii.] STATE OF SCOTLAND. II 

of Kant ; and it is to be said in behalf of Brown, that he never 
mounts into a region of cloudy speculation ; and in favor of 
Hamilton, that his most vigorous efforts were employed in show- 
ing how little can be known by man. All the great masters 
of the school not only admit, but are at pains to show, that 
there are mysteries in the mind of man, and in every depart- 
ment of human speculation, which they cannot clear up. This 
feature has tempted some to speak of the whole school with 
contempt, as doing little because attempting little. They have 
been charged with their country's sin of caution, and the 
national reproach of poverty has been unsparingly cast upon 
them. Let them not deny, let them avow, that the charge is 
just. Let them acknowledge that they have proceeded in time 
past in the patient method of induction, and announce openly, 
and without shame, that they mean to do so in time to come. 
Let it be their claim, that if they have not discovered all truth, 
they have discovered and settled some truth ; while they have 
not promulgated much error, or wasted their strength in rearing 
showy fabrics, admired in one age and taken down the next. 
It is the true merit of Scotchmen that, without any natural 
advantages of soil or climate, they have carefully cultivated 
their land, and made it yield a liberal produce, and that they 
have been roused to activity, and stimulated to industry, by 
their very poverty. Let it, in like manner, be the boast of the 
Scottish philosophy, that it has made profitable use of the 
materials at its disposal, and that it has by patience and shrewd- 
ness succeeded in establishing a body of fundamental truth, 
which can never be shaken, but which shall stand as a bulwark 
in philosophy, morals, and theology, as long as time endures. 



II. — STATE OF SCOTLAND. 

During the seventeenth century, the three kingdoms had 
passed through a series of political and religious convulsions, 
and in the opening of the following century the Protestant peo- 
ple were seeking to enjoy and improve the seasonable — as 
they reckoned it the providential — rest which was brought by 
the Revolution Settlement. The floods had swept over the 



12 STATE OF SCOTLAND. [Art. ii. 

country, partly to destroy and partly to fertilize, and men are 
busily employed in removing the evils (as they reckon them) 
which had been left, and in sowing, planting, and building on 
the now dry and undisturbed territory. In particular, there is 
a strong desire on the part of the great body of the people to 
make the best use of the peace which they now possess, and to 
employ it to draw forth the material resources of the country. 
As a consequence of the intellectual stimulus which had been 
called forth mainly by the previous great contests, and of the 
liberty achieved, and the industry in active exercise, the riches 
of the nation are increasing, agriculture begins to make prog- 
ress, great commercial cities are aggregating, household and 
social elegance and comfort are sought after and in a great 
measure secured, refinement of manners is cultivated, and civil- 
ization is advancing. In the eager pursuit of these worldly 
ends, the generation then springing up scarcely set sufficient 
value on the higher blessings which had been secured by the 
struggles of their forefathers. By the profound discussions of 
the seventeenth century, the great body of the people had been 
made to read their Bibles, and to inquire into the foundation 
and functions of political government. By the deeds done, by 
the sufferings endured, and the principles enunciated, the 
great questions of civil and religious liberty had been started, 
and opinions set afloat which were ultimately to settle them 
theoretically and practically. But the race now reared did not 
sufficiently appreciate the advantages thence accruing. They 
were kept from doing so by two impressions left by the terri- 
ble battles which had been fought on their soil. 

Every one who has read the history of the period knows 
that a large amount of profligacy had prevailed among certain 
classes in the latter reigns of the Stuarts. The rampant vice 
led naturally to religious infidelity, and the two continued to 
act and react on each other. Self-indulgent men were little 
inclined to value the truths of spiritual religion, and lent their 
ears to plausible systems of belief or unbelief which left them 
undisturbed in their worldly enjoyments ; while youths who 
had broken loose from the old religious trammels were often 
tempted to break through moral restraints likewise, and to 
rush into vice, as exhibiting spirit and courage. The great 
cavalier party, composed largely of the upper classes, and of 



Art. ii.] STRUGGLES OF THE CENTURY. 1 3 

those who aspired to rise to them, had been all along in the 
habit of ridiculing the fervor and strictness of the puritan 
movement, which had sprung up chiefly among the middle and 
better portion of the lower classes, and of describing all who 
made solemn pretensions to religion as being either knaves or 
fools. Many of those who had originally brought the charge 
did not believe it in their hearts, as they had been constrained 
to respect the great and good qualities of their opponents ; but 
they succeeded in instilling their sentiments into the minds of 
their children, who were, taught to regard it as a mark of a 
gentleman to swear and to scoff at all religion. From what- 
ever causes it may have proceeded, it is certain that in the first 
half of the eighteenth century there is a frequent and loud com- 
plaint on the part of theologians, both within and beyond the 
Established Churches, of the rapid increase and wide preva- 
lence of infidelity, and even of secret or avowed atheism. 

The struggles of the seventeenth century had left another 
very deep sentiment. The sects had contended so much about 
minor points, that now, in the reaction, there was a strong dis- 
position, both among the professedly religious and irreligious, 
to set little or no value on doctrinal differences, and to turn 
away with distaste from all disputes among ecclesiastical bod- 
ies. The indifference thence ensuing tended, equally with the 
mistaken zeal of the previous age, to prevent the principles of 
toleration from being thoroughly carried out. Those who stood 
up for what were esteemed small peculiarities were reckoned 
pragmatical and obstinate. Their attempts to secure full lib- 
erty of worship and of propagation met with little sympathy, 
and were supposed to be fitted to bring back needlessly the 
battles and the sufferings of the previous ages. 

The two sentiments combined, the desire to have a liberal 
or a loose creed, and the aversion to the discussion of lesser 
differences, issued in a result which it is more to our present 
purpose to contemplate. It led the great thinkers of the age, 
such as Samuel Clarke, Berkeley, and Butler, to spend their 
strength, not so much in discussing doctrines disputed among 
Christians, as in defending religion in general, and in laying a 
deep foundation on which to rest the essential principles of 
morality and the eternal truths of religion, natural and revealed. 
The first age of the eighteenth century, as it was the period 



14 STATE OF SCOTLAND. [Art. ii. 

in which the first serious attacks were made on Christianity, 
so it was also the time in which were produced the first great 
modern defences of religion, natural and supernatural. Men 
of inferior philosophical breadth, but of eminent literary power, 
such as Addison, were also employing their gifts and accom- 
plishments and contributing to what they reckoned the same 
good end, by writing apologies in behalf of religion, and labor- 
ing to make it appear amiable, reasonable, and refined. 

These same causes led preachers of the new school to assume 
a sort of apologetic air in their discourses, to cultivate a refined 
language, moulded on the French, and not the old English 
model, to avoid all extravagance of statement and appeal, to 
decline doctrinal controversy, and to dwell much on truths, 
such as the immortality of the soul, common to Christianity 
and to natural religion, and to enlarge on the loveliness of 
the Bible morality. The manner and spirit were highly pleas- 
ing to many in the upper and refined classes ; were acceptable 
to those who disliked earnest religion, as they had nothing of 
" the offence of the cross ; " and were commended by some 
who valued religion, as it seemed to present piety in so attrac- 
tive a light to their young men, about whom they were so anx- 
ious in those times, and of whom they hoped that they would 
thus be led to imbibe its elements, and thereby acquire a taste 
for its higher truths. But all this was powerless on the great 
body of the people, who were perfectly prepared to believe the 
preacher when he told them that they were sinners, and that 
God had provided a Saviour, but felt little interest in refined 
apologies in behalf of God and Christ and duty ; and they grad- 
ually slipped away from a religion and a religious worship 
which had nothing to interest, because they had nothing to 
move them. All this was offensive in the extreme to those 
who had been taught to value a deeper doctrine and a warmer 
piety. They complained that when they needed food they 
were presented with flowers ; and, discontented with the pres- 
ent state of things, they were praying for a better era. 

To complete the picture of the times, it should be added 
that there was little vital piety among the clergy to counteract 
the tendency to religious indifference. The appointments to 
the livings in England and Ireland lay in the hands of the 
government and the upper classes, who preferred men of refine- 



Art. ii.] STATE OF RELIGION. 15 

ment and prudence, inclined to political moderation or subser- 
viency, to men of spiritual warmth and religious independence. 
The Nonconformists themselves felt the somnolent influence 
creeping over them, after the excitement of the battle in which 
they had been engaged was over. Their pastors were restrained 
in their ministrations, and consequently in their activities, by 
laws which were a plain violation of the principles of tolera- 
tion, but which, as they did not issue in any overt act of bitter 
persecution, were not resented with keenness by the higher 
class of Dissenters, who, to tell the truth, after what they had 
come through in the previous age, were not much inclined to 
provoke anew the enmity from which they had suffered, but 
were rather disposed, provided only their individual convictions 
were not interfered with, to take advantage of what liberty they 
had, to proclaim peace with others, and to embrace the oppor- 
tunities thrown open to them in the growing cities and manu- 
factories, of promoting the temporal interests of themselves 
and their families. In these circumstances, the younger min- 
isters, were often allured (as Butler was) to go over to the 
Established Church ; and those who remained were infected 
with the spirit which prevailed around them, and sought to 
appear as elegant and as liberal as the clergy of the church, 
who were beginning to steal from them the more genteel por- 
tion of the younger members of their flocks. The design of 
those who favored this movement was no doubt to make 
religion attractive and respected. The result did not realize 
the expectation. The upper classes were certainly not scan- 
dalized by a religion which was so inoffensive, but they never 
thought of heartily embracing what they knew had no earnest- 
ness ; and, paying only a distant and respectful obeisance to 
religion in the general, they gave themselves up to the fashion- 
able vices, or, at best, practised only the fashionable moralities 
of their times. The common people, little cared for by the 
clergy, and caring nothing for the refined emptiness presented 
to them instead of a living religion, went through their daily 
toils with diligence, but in most districts, both of town and 
country, viewed religion with indifference, and relieved their 
manual labor with low indulgences. England is rapidly grow- 
ing in wealth and civilization, and even in industry, mainly from 
the intellectual stimulus imparted by moral causes acting in the 



16 STATE OF SCOTLAND. [Art. n. 

previous ages ; but it is fast descending to the most unbeliev- 
ing condition to which it has ever been reduced. From this 
state of religious apathy it is roused, so far as the masses of 
the people are concerned, in the next age, and ere the life had 
altogether died out, by the trumpet voices of Whitfield and 
Wesley. It was in a later age, and after the earthquake con- 
vulsions of the French Revolution had shaken society to its 
foundation, that the upper classes were made to know and feel 
that when " the salt has lost its savor," it is good for nothing 
but to be cast out and trodden under foot of men, and that a 
dead religion is of no use either to rich or poor, either for polit- 
ical ends or for personal comfort. 

An analogous, but by no means identical, process begins and 
goes on, and is consummated in Scotland about half an age or 
an age later in point of time. All throughout the seventeenth 
century, Scotland, like England, had been ploughed by relig- 
ious contests. But the penetrating observer notices a dif- 
ference between the shape taken by the struggle in the two 
countries. In England, the war had been a purely internal one 
between opposing principles, the prelatic and puritan ; whereas, 
in Scotland, the battle had been mainly against an external foe, 
that is, an English power, which sought to impose a prelatic 
church on the people contrary to their wishes. Again, in 
England the contest had been against an ecclesiastical power, 
which sought to crush civil liberty ; whereas, in Scotland, the 
power of the Church of Scotland had been exerted in behalf of 
the people, and against a foreign domination. This difference 
in the struggle was followed by a difference in the state of feel- 
ing resulting when the contest was terminated by the accession 
of William and Mary. 

The great body of the people, at least in the Lowlands, 
acquiesced in the Revolution Settlement, and clung round the 
Government and the Presbyterian Church as by law established. 
But there soon arose antagonisms, which, though they did not 
break out into open wars, as in the previous century, did yet 
range the country into sections and parties with widely differ- 
ing sympathies and aims. In fact, Scotland was quite as much 
divided in opinion and sentiment in the eighteenth, as it ever 
was in the seventeenth century. In saying so, I do not refer 
to the strong prelatic feeling which existed all over the north- 



Art. ii.] CHURCH OF SCOTLAND. 1 7 

east coast of Scotland, or to the attachment to the house of 
Stuart which prevailed in the Highlands, — for these, though 
they led to the uprisings of 171 5 and 1745, were only the back- 
ward beatings of the retreating tide, — but to other and stronger 
currents which have been flowing and coming into more or 
less violent collision with one another from that day till ours. 

At the close of the seventeenth and beginning of the eigh- 
teenth century, the Church of Scotland was composed of a 
somewhat heterogeneous mixture of covenanting ministers, 
who had lived in the times of persecution ; of prelatic clergy 
whose convictions in favor of Episcopacy were not sufficiently 
deep to induce them to abandon their livings, and to suffer the 
annoyances and persecutions to which the more sincere non- 
jurors were exposed ; and of a race of young men zealous for 
the Presbyterian establishment, but " only half educated and 
superficially accomplished." The conforming " curates " were 
commonly indifferent to religion of every kind, and it was 
hoped that they would soon die out, and that the heritors 
and elders, with whom the election of pastors lay, would fill 
the churches with a learned and zealous ministry. But, in 
171 1, the Jacobite government of Queen Anne took the power 
of election from the parish authorities, and vested it in the 
ancient patrons, being the Crown for above five hundred and 
fifty livings, and noblemen, gentlemen of landed property, and 
town-councils, for the remaining four hundred. 1 The effect of 
this new law became visible in the course of years, in the 
appointment of persons to the churches who, for good reasons 
or bad, were acceptable to the government of the day, or were 
able to secure the favor of the private patrons. 

Forced upon the people in the first instance, there was a 
public feeling ready to gather round this law of patronage. 
From bad motives and from good — like those which we have 
traced in England — there was a desire among the upper, and 
a portion of the middle and educated, classes to have a clergy 
suited to the new age which had come in. As the result, there 
was formed a type of ministers which has continued till nearly 
our time in Scotland, called " new light " by the people, and 
designating themselves " moderates," as claiming the virtue of 
being moderate in all things, though, as Witherspoon charges 

1 See "Considerations on Patronage, by Francis Hutcheson," 1735. 

2 



18 STATE OF SCOTLAND. [Art. ii. 

them, they became very immoderate for moderation, when they 
rose to be the dominant party. Most of them refrained in their 
preaching from uttering -a very decided sound on disputed doc- 
trinal points ; some of them were suspected of Arianism or 
Socinianism, which, however, they kept to themselves out of 
respect for, or fear of, the Confession of Faith, which they had 
sworn to adhere to ; the more highly educated of them culti- 
vated a refinement and elegance of diction, and dwelt much on 
the truths common to both natural and revealed religion ; and 
all of them were fond of depicting the high morality of the New 
Testament, and of recommending the example of Jesus. It is 
scarcely necessary to remark, that this style of preaching did 
not gain, as it did not warm, the hearts of the common people, 
who either became callous to all religion, without any zealous 
efforts being made to stir them up, or longed and prayed for a 
better state of things. The enforcement of the law of patron- 
age, and the settlement of ministers against the wishes of the 
people, led to the separation of the Erskines and the Secession 
Body in 1733, and of Gillespie and the Relief Body in 1753. 
In the Established Church there still remained a number of 
men of evangelical views and popular sympathies, such as Wil- 
lison and Boston, who hoped that they might stem and ulti- 
mately turn the tide which was for the time against them. 
The boast of the moderate party was, that they were introduc- 
ing into Scotland a greater liberality of sentiment on religious 
topics, and a greater refinement of taste. The charge against 
them is, that they abandoned the peculiar doctrines of the gos- 
pel, that they could not draw towards them the affections of 
the people who, in rural districts, sank into a stupid ignorance 
of religious truth, and, in the crowded lanes of the rising cities, 
into utter ungodliness and criminality, — except, indeed, in so 
far as they were drawn out by the rapidly increasing dissent- 
ers, or by the evangelical minority within the Established 
Church. 

The collisions of the century took various forms. After the 
Union with England, dancing assemblies, theatres, and wan- 
dering players (with Allan Ramsay to patronize them), dancing 
on the tight-rope, cock-fighting, gambling, and horse-racing 
make their appearance, and receive considerable countenance 
and patronage from various classes, upper and lower ; while 



Art. ii.] CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE. 1 9 

ineffectual attempts are made to put them down by civil penal- 
ties inflicted by burgher magistrates, and by public ecclesias- 
tical censures, which the zealous clergy rigidly enforce, but 
which the new-light clergy are anxious to relax. In the turmoil 
of opinions which sprang up in this new state of things, there 
are rumors of deism, and even of atheism, being secretly enter- 
tained or openly avowed, and of the establishment here and 
there, in town and country, of " hell-fire clubs," where bold men 
met to discuss new opinions, and even, it is said, to act mock 
ceremonies, intended to ridicule the sacraments, and all that is 
awful in religion. Worse than all, and without being much 
noticed, or meeting with much opposition on the part of the 
clergy of either party, there is the commencement of those 
drinking customs, which have ever since exercised so preju- 
dicial an influence on the Scottish character. 

If we look to the common people in the first quarter of the 
century, we find them in a state of great rudeness in respect of 
the comforts and elegancies of life. In the Highlands, they 
are scarcely removed above the lowest state of barbarism ; and 
in the borders between the Highlands and Lowlands, the Celts 
are lifting cattle and exacting black-mail from the Lowlanders. 
Even in the more favored districts in the south of Scotland, the 
ground is unfenced ; roads are very rare ; and goods are car- 
ried on the backs of horses. The clothing of the people in the 
same region is of undyed black and white plaiding, and neither 
men nor women have shoes or stockings. Their ordinary food 
is oatmeal, pease, or beer, with kail groats and milk, and they 
rarely partake of flesh meat. The houses have only the bare 
ground as floors, with a fireplace in the midst, and the smoke 
escaping out of a hole in the roof, and with seats and the very 
beds of turf ; even in the dwellings of the farmers there are sel- 
dom more than two apartments ; not unfrequently, however, 
in the south-west of Scotland, there is in addition a closet, to 
which the head of the house would retire at set times for devo- 
tion. 

Superstitious beliefs are still entertained in all ranks of life, 
and are only beginning to disappear among the educated 
classes. In the Highlands and Islands, second-sight is as firmly 
believed by the chieftain as by the clansmen. In the Low- 
lands, mysterious diseases, arising from a deranged nervous 



20 STATE OF SCOTLAND. [Art. it. 

system, are ascribed to demoniacal possessions ; and witches, 
supposed to have sold themselves to the Evil One, and accom- 
plishing his purposes in inflicting direful evils on the persons 
and properties of neighbors, are being punished by the mag- 
istrates, who are always incited on by the people, and often by 
the more zealous ministers of religion. Toleration is not 
understood or acknowledged by any of the great parties, politi- 
cal or religious. 

What, it may be asked, is there in the condition of this peo- 
ple fitted to raise any hope that they are ever to occupy a high 
place among the nations of the earth ? I am sure that a 
worldly-minded traveller, or an admirer of mere refinement and 
art, in visiting the country at those times, and comparing it 
with France or Italy, would have discovered nothing in it to 
lead him to think that it was to have a glorious future before 
it. But a deeper and more spiritually-minded observer might 
have discovered already the seeds of its coming intelligence 
and love of freedom : — in the schools and colleges planted 
throughout the land ; in the love of education instilled into the 
minds of the people ; and, above all, in their acquaintance with 
the Bible, and in their determined adherence to what they 
believed to be the truth of God. 1 

Before the first age of the century has passed, there are 
unmistakable signs of industrial and intellectual activity. The 
Union has connected the upper classes with the metropolis 
and the Court of England, from which they are receiving a new 
refinement and some mental stimulus. The middle classes, 
and even the lower orders, are obtaining instruction from a very 
different quarter, from their parochial schools and churches, 

1 Mr. Buckle is reported to have expressed, in his dying days, his regret that 
he could not see moral causes operating in the promotion of civilization. Of 
course intellectual power must always be the immediate agent in producing civil- 
ization ; but did it never occur to Mr. Buckle to ask what stirred up the intellec- 
tual power in a country so unfavorably situated as Scotland ? It is all true that 
steam power is the main agent in producing manufactures in our country ; but 
how contracted would be the vision of one who can see only the steam power, 
and not the intellectual power which called the steam into operation ! Equally 
narrow is the view of the man who discerns the intellectual power which effected 
the peculiar civilization of Scotland, but cannot discover the moral power which 
awoke the intelligence. It should be added, that just as the steam power, in- 
vented by intellectual skill, may be devoted to very unintellectual uses, so the 
intelligence aroused by moral or religious causes may be turned (as Scotland 
shows) to very immoral and irreligious ends. 



Akt.ii.] INFLUENCE OF THE PHILOSOPHY. 21 

from their burgh academies and their universities. The towns 
are hastening to take advantage of the new channels of trade 
and commerce ; manufactures are springing up in various 
places, and already there is a considerable trading intercourse 
between the west of Scotland and America. The proprietors 
of the soil, in need of money to support their English life and 
to buy luxuries, are beginning to subdivide and enclose their 
lands, and to grant better dwellings and leases to their tenantry, 
who, being thereby placed in circumstances fitted to encourage 
and reward industry, are prepared to reclaim waste lands, to 
manure their grounds, to improve their stock of sheep and cat- 
tle, and introduce improved agricultural implements. 

This imperfect sketch may help the reader to comprehend 
the circumstances in which the Scottish philosophy sprang up 
and grew to maturity, and the part which its expounders acted 
in the national history. It could have appeared only in a time 
of peace and temporal prosperity, but there had been a prepa- 
ration for it in the prior struggles. The stream which had 
risen in a higher region, and long pursued its course in rugged- 
ness, — like the rivers of the country, — is now flowing through 
more level ground, and raising up plenty on its banks. It is a 
collegiate, and therefore a somewhat isolated, element among 
the agencies which were forming the national character and 
directing the national destiny ; but it had its sphere. Through 
the students at the universities, it fostered a taste for literature 
and art ; it promoted a spirit of toleration, and softened the 
national asperities in religious and other discussions ; it is iden- 
tified with the liberalism of Scotland, and through Adam Smith, 
D. Stewart, Mackintosh, Horner, Brougham, Jeffrey, Sydney 
Smith, Lord John Russell, and Palmerston, with the liberalism 
of the three kingdoms ; and, above all, it has trained the edu- 
cated portion of the inhabitants of North Britain to habits of 
reflection and of independent thought. The Scottish meta- 
physicians, with the exception of Chalmers, have never identi- 
fied themselves very deeply with the more earnest spiritual 
life of the country ; but they defended the fundamental truths 
of natural religion, and they ever spoke respectfully of the 
Bible. The Scottish philosophy, so far as it is a co-ordination 
of the facts of consciousness, never can be antagonistic to a 
true theology ; I believe indeed it may help to establish some 



22 PRECURSORS OF THE SCHOOL. [Art. hi. 

of the vital truths of religion, by means, for instance, of the 
moral faculty, the existence of which has been so resolutely 
maintained by the Scottish school. Some of the moderate 
clergy did at times preach the Scottish moral philosophy instead 
of scriptural truth ; but they did so in opposition to the counsel 
of the metaphysicians, at least of Hutcheson, who recommended 
his students to avoid the discussion of philosophic topics in the 
pulpit. Some of those who have been the most influential 
expounders of the Scottish theology, such as Chalmers and 
Welsh, have also been supporters of the Scottish philosophy, 
and have drawn from its established doctrines arguments in 
favor of evangelical religion. 



III.— PRECURSORS OF THE SCHOOL. 

In the Libraries of some of the Scotch Colleges are collected 
a number of the theses which had been defended in the Scot- 
tish Universities in the seventeenth century. These seem to 
fall under the heads of Theses Logicae, Theses Ethics, Theses 
Physical, Theses Spherical. Aristotle still rules both in logic 
and ethics. In logic, there is much abstract enunciation, and 
there are many acute distinctions in regard to Ens and unity, 
singulars and universals ; and in ethics, the discussions are 
about virtue and vice, and choice. In physics, there are 
rational and deductive investigations of the nature of motion 
and resistance. During the century, the courses of study differ 
somewhat in the different universities, but still there is a gen- 
eral correspondence. In the course of Philosophy the Regents 
use Aristotle De Anima, Porphyry's Introduction, the Catego- 
ries of Aristotle, the Dialectics of Ramus, and the Rhetoric of 
Vossius, with the works of such writers as Crassotus, Reas, 
Burgersdicius, Ariaga, Oviedo, &c. The ethics include politics 
and economics, and there are discussions about the nature of 
habits. It is scarcely necessary to say that all topics are 
treated in a logical and rational, and not in an observational, 
manner and spirit. 

The Parliamentary Commission for visiting the universities, 
appointed in 1690, and following years, directed, in 1695, the 



Art. in.] PHILOSOPHY OF PREVIOUS CENTURY. 23 

professors of philosophy in St. Andrews to prepare the heads 
of a system of logic, and the corresponding professors in Edin- 
burgh to prepare a course of metaphysics. The compends 
drawn up in consequence were passed from one college to 
another for revision ; there is no evidence that they were finally 
sanctioned, but they may be accepted as giving a fair idea of 
the instructions in philosophy conveyed in the universities of 
Scotland at the close of the eighteenth century, — at the very 
time when Locke's Essay was finding its way so rapidly over 
the three kingdoms. 1 Logic is called the instrument to acquire 
other sciences, inasmuch as it prescribes rules for rightly appre- 
hending, judging, and arguing. It is said to be defined by 
others as the science which directs the operations of the mind 
for finding out truth in every other science. It is represented 
as treating of the three operations of apprehension, judgment, 
and discourse, to which some add a fourth part, on method, 
under which analysis and synthesis are explained. In all this 
there is nothing but the commonplace of by-gone ages. But in 
this same text-book of logic we have the distinction drawn in 
the Port Royal Logic, between the extension and comprehen- 
sion of the notion, adopted and stated. "We must distinguish 
betwixt the extension and comprehension of an idea. All the 
essential attributes of an idea are called its comprehension, as 
being, substance, vegetative, sensitive, and rational are the 
comprehension of man ; but Peter, Paul, &c, contained under 
man, are called the extent of man." It can be shown that this 
distinction comes down in an unbroken historical chain in Glas- 
gow to Sir W. Hamilton, who has so profitably amplified and 
applied it. It is found in the Introduction to Logic by Car- 
michael, and in the Logical Compend of Hutcheson ; and the 
latter continued to be used in Glasgow till towards the time 
when Hamilton was a student there. 

Metaphysics are said to be defined by some, as a science of 
being as being ; by others as a speculative science, which con- 
siders being in general, and its properties and kinds, as ab- 
stracted from matter. The benefits arising from the study of 
metaphysics are said to be, that treating of undoubted truths 
and axioms, we are enabled by their assistance the better to 
discover truths generally, and avoid errors ; that as dividing 

1 There is a copy in the Edinburgh University Library. 



24 PRECURSORS OF THE SCHOOL. [Art. hi. 

beings into classes it keeps us from confusion ; that giving* 
general names to common and abstracted beings, it aids the 
understanding in every kind of learning, and specially in theol- 
ogy, in which use is made of metaphysical terms. The first 
part of metaphysics treats of the principles of being, and of the 
various species of beings. The second part treats of the prop- 
erties of being, such as unity, verity, goodness ; and under 
this head we have abstract discussions as to the finite and infi- 
nite, the necessary and contingent, the absolute and relative, 
cause and effect, means and end, substance and quality. Such 
was the pabulum on which college youths fed during the cen- 
tury. This was the learning which helped to sharpen the intel- 
lects of such men as Henderson, Rutherford, Leighton, 
Gillespie, Baillie, Dickson, Burnet (Bishop), Stair (Lord), and 
Carstairs, who acted so important a part in the affairs of their 
country. 

But in order to appreciate fully the philosophic tastes and 
capacities of Scotchmen, we must follow them into France. 
From a very old date, certainly from the thirteenth century, 
there had been a close connection between that country and 
Scotland, arising from the jealousy entertained by both nations 
of the power and ambition of England. The Scottish youth 
who had a love of adventure, or a thirst for military glory, had 
a splendid opening provided for them in the Scottish Guard, 
which protected the person of the king of France, while those 
who had a taste for letters found means of instruction and 
employment in the numerous French colleges. 1 The Scotch 
scholars who returned to their own land brought back the 
French learning with them. Bishop Elphinston, who was the 
founder, and Hector Boece, who was the first principal of 
King's College, Aberdeen, had both taught in the University 
of Paris ; and they set up the Scottish University on the model 
of the French one. John Major or Mair, who taught scholastic 
theology in Glasgow and St. Andrews, and who was the precep- 
tor of Knox and Buchanan, had been for some time in the Uni- 
versity of Paris. During the sixteenth, and the early part of 
the seventeenth century, there was a perpetual stream of Scot- 
tish scholars flowing into France. Some of these were Catho- 

1 The reader curious on this subject will find ample information in "Les 
Ecossais en France," by Michel. 



Art. hi.] SCOTCHMEN IN FRANCE. 25 

lies, to whom toleration was denied at home, and who betook 
themselves to a country where they had scope for the free 
exercise of their gifts. But quite as many were Protestants, 
who finding (as Scotchmen in later ages have done) their own 
land too narrow, or thirsting for farther knowledge or learned 
employment, connected themselves with one or other of the 
reformed colleges of Saumur, Montauban, Sedan, Montpellier, 
and Nismes, where some of them remained all their lives, while 
others returned to their own country. Some of these emigrants 
were lawyers or physicians ; but by far the greater number 
of them were devoted to literature, philosophy, or theology. 
George Buchanan, Thomas Ricalton, three Blackwoods,. Thomas 
Dempster, two Barclays, Andrew Melville, John Cameron, Wal- 
ter Donaldson, and William Chalmers are only a few of the 
Scotchmen who occupied important offices in France. Two 
deserve to be specially named, as they wrote able logical works, 
— the one, Robert Balfour, a Catholic, and Principal of Guienne 
College, Bourdeaux, and an erudite commentator on Aristotle ; 
and the other, Mark Duncan, a Protestant, and Principal of the 
University of Saumur, and author of Institutes of Logic. 
There must have been some reality as the ground of the ex- 
travagant statement of Sir Thomas Urquhart in his " Discovery 
of a Most Exquisite Jewel," that "the most of the Scottish na- 
tion, never having restricted themselves so much to the pro- 
priety of words as to the knowledge of things, where there was 
one preceptor of languages among them, there was above forty 
professors of philosophy." "The French conceived the Scots 
to have above all nations in matter of their subtlety in philo- 
sophical disputations, that there have not been till of late for 
these several years together any lord, gentleman, or other in 
all that country, who, being desirous to have his son instructed 
in the principles of philosophy, would entrust him to the dis- 
cipline of any other than a Scottish master." He adds, that 
" if a Frenchman entered into competition, a Scotchman would 
be preferred." 

By such teaching at home, and by such foreign intercourse, 
a considerable amount of narrow but intense intellectual life 
was produced and fostered in Scotland. But youths were be- 
ginning to feel that the air was too close, too confined, and too 
monastic for them, and were longing for greater freedom and 



26 PRECURSORS OF THE SCHOOL. [Art. hi. 

expansion. While Aristotle and the scholastic method still 
hold their place in the cloisters of the colleges, there is a more 
bracing atmosphere in the regions without and beyond ; and 
this is now to rush into Scotland. 

From the time of the revival of letters in the sixteenth cen- 
tury, almost every great and original thinker had thought it 
necessary to protest against the authority of Aristotle and the 
schoolmen. Bacon left Cambridge with a thorough contempt 
for the scholastic studies pursued there ; and the grand end 
aimed at in his " Novum Organum," was to carry away men's 
regards from words and notions, to which they had paid too 
exclusive attention, and to fix them on things. In respect of a 
disposition to rebel against Aristotle and the schoolmen, Des- 
cartes was of the same spirit as Bacon ; and Gassendi and 
Hobbes agreed with Descartes, with whom they differed in 
almost every thing else. It would be easy to produce a succes- 
sion of strong testimonies against the Stagyrite and the Mediae- 
vals, spread over the whole of the seventeenth century. The 
rising sentiment is graphically expressed by Glanvil in his 
"Scepsis Scientifica," published in 1665. He declares that 
the " ingenious world is grown quite weary of qualities and 
forms ; " he declaims against " dry spinosities, lean notions, 
endless altercations about things of nothing ; " and he recom- 
mends a " knowledge of nature, without which our hypotheses 
are but dreams and romances, and our science mere conjecture 
and opinion ; for, while we have schemes of things without con- 
sulting the phenomena, we do but build in the air, and describe 
an imaginary world of our own making, that is but little akin 
to the real one that God made." 

The realistic reaction took two different but not totally diver- 
gent directions in the seventeenth century, and both the streams 
reached Scotland in the following century. In the works of 
Grotius and PufTendorf, an elaborate attempt was made to 
determine the laws of nature in regard to man's political and 
social conditions, and apply the same to the examination and 
rectification of national and international laws. This was 
thought by many to be a more profitable and promising theme 
than the perpetual discussion of the nature of being and uni- 
versals. This school had undoubtedly its influence in Scotland, 
where Carmichael, in 17 18, edited and annotated PufTendorf, 



Art. hi.] GROTIUS AND LOCKE. 27 

and where Hutcheson, and Hume, and A. Smith, and Fergu- 
son, and D. Stewart, combined juridical and political with moral 
inquiries, and became the most influential writers of the cen- 
tury on all questions of what has since been called social sci- 
ence. 

But a stronger and deeper current was setting in about the 
same time, — a determination to have the experimental mode 
of investigation applied to every department of knowledge. 
This method had already been applied to physical science with 
brilliant results. And now there was a strong desire felt to 
have the new manner adopted in the investigation of the 
human mind. In 1670, John Locke and five or six friends are 
conversing in his chamber in Oxford on a knotty topic, and 
quickly they find themselves at a stand ; and it occurred to 
Locke that, before entering " on inquiries of that nature, it was 
necessary to examine our own abilities, and see what objects 
our understandings were or were not fitted to deal with." He 
pondered and wrote on this subject for twenty years, at the 
close of which (in 1690) he published his immortal " Essay on 
the Human Understanding." In this work he would banish 
for ever those innate ideas which had offered such obstacles to 
the progress of thought ; and, by an inquiry into the actual 
operations of the human mind, he would trace the ways in 
which mankind attain ideas and knowledge, and settle the 
bounds imposed on the human understanding. Locke's Essay 
was hailed with acclamation by all who were wearied of the old 
scholastic abstractions and distinctions, and who had caught 
the new spirit that was abroad. 

Still Locke's Essay was not allowed to take possession of the 
thinking minds of the country without a vigorous opposition. 
Locke was met in his own day by Stillingfleet, the Bishop 
of Worcester, who argued resolutely that the view given in 
the Essay of our idea of substance was not sufficiently deep to 
enable it to bear up the great truths of religion, especially the 
doctrine- of the Trinity. The great Leibnitz severely blamed 
Locke for overlooking necessary truth, and reviewed his work, 
book by book and chapter by chapter, in his " Nouveaux Essais 
sur l'Entendement Humain ;" which, however, in consequence 
of Locke's death taking place in the mean time, was not pub- 
lished for many years after. It was felt by many otherwise 



28 PRECURSORS OF THE SCHOOL. [Art. hi. 

favorable to the new spirit, that Locke had not laid a suffi- 
ciently deep foundation for morality in his account of our idea 
of virtue, which he derived from mere sensations of pleasure 
and pain, with the law of God superadded in utter inconsistency 
with his theory. There were still in England adherents of the 
great English moralists, More and Cudworth, who had opposed 
Hobbes with learning and ability ; and these maintained that 
there was need of deeper principles than those laid down by 
Locke to oppose the all-devouring pantheistic fatalism of Spi- 
noza on the one hand, and the rising materialistic spirit on the 
other. 

In the early part of the eighteenth century, there appeared 
several works which were not conceived at least wholly in the 
spirit of Locke. I do not refer to such works as Norris's 
" Ideal World," in which we have an able defence of the Aristo- 
telian analysis of reasoning, and an exposition of Platonism, 
more ideal far than that presented in Plato's own dialectic ; nor 
to Collier's " Clavis," " being a demonstration of the non-exist- 
ence or impossibility of an external world : " I allude to works 
which left a far deeper impression on their age. Samuel 
Clarke, with vast erudition and great logical power, was estab- 
lishing, in a mathematical manner, the existence and attributes 
of God, giving virtue a place among the eternal relations of 
things perceived by reason, and defending the doctrine of 
human freedom and responsibility against those who were 
reducing men to the condition of brutes or machines. Berkeley 
did adopt the theory of Locke as to the mind being percipient 
only of ideas, but the view which he took of human knowledge 
was very different ; for while Locke, consistently or inconsis- 
tently, was a sober realist, Berkeley labored to show that 
there was no substantial reality except spirit, and thought in 
this way to arrest the swelling tide of materialism and scepti- 
cism. A more accurate thinker than either, Bishop Butler, 
was establishing the supremacy of conscience, and showing that 
there was a moral government in the world ; and that -revealed 
religion was suited to the constitution of the mind, and to the 
position in which man is placed. 

It was while philosophic thought was in this state that the 
Scottish Philosophy sprang up. The Scottish metaphysicians 
largely imbibed the spirit of Locke ; all of them speak of him 



Art. iv.] SHAFTESBURY. 29 

with profound respect ; and they never differ from him without 
expressing a regret or offering an apology. Still the Scottish 
school never adopted the full theory of Locke ; on the contrary, 
they opposed it in some of its most essential points ; and this 
while they never gave in to the mathematical method of Clarke, 
and while they opposed the ingenuities of Berkeley. Hutche- 
son, the founder of the Scottish school, was a rather earlier 
author than Butler, to whom therefore he was not indebted for 
the peculiarities of his method and system. But there was a 
writer to whom both Butler and Hutcheson, and the early 
Scottish school generally, were under deeper obligation than to 
any other author, or all other authors, and who deserves in 
consequence a more special notice. 



IV. — SHAFTESB UR V. 

The author who exercised the most influence on the earlier 
philosophic school of Scotland was not Locke, but Lord Shaftes- 
bury (born 1 67 1, died 171 3), the grandson of the Lord Chan- 
cellor Shaftesbury, who had been the friend of Locke. " Peace," 
says he, " be with the soul of that charitable and courteous 
author, who, for the common benefit of his fellow-authors, 
introduced the way of miscellaneous writing." He follows this 
miscellaneous method. The pieces which were afterwards 
combined in his " Characteristics of Men, Manners, and Times," 
were written at various times, from 1707 to 1712. They con- 
sist of a " Letter Concerning Enthusiasm," " Sensus Commu- 
nis, an Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor," " Soliloquy, 
or, Advice to an Author," " An Inquiry Concerning Virtue and 
Merit," " The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody," " Miscella- 
neous Reflections on the said Treatises, and other Critical 
Subjects," "A Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature 
of the Judgment of Hercules, with a Letter concerning Design." 
He tells us that the miscellaneous manner was in the highest 
esteem in his day, that the old plan of subdividing into firsts 
and seconds had grown out of fashion, and that the " elegant 
court divine exhorts in miscellany, and is ashamed to bring his 



30 SHAFTS SB UR Y. [Art. iv. 

twos and threes before a fashionable assembly." " Ragouts and 
fricassees are the reigning dishes ; so authors, in order to 
become fashionable, have run into the more savory way of 
learned ragout and medley." His style is evidently after the 
French, and not the old English, model. It has the jaunty air 
of one who affects to be a man of elegance and fashion. Un- 
doubtedly he was extensively read in the Greek and Roman 
philosophy, especially in Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and the 
Roman Stoics, and he has many just and profound views, but 
these are ever made to appear as the ornaments of a modern 
nobleman, who studies philosophy as an accomplishment. 

His " Characteristics " open with remarks on " Enthusiasm," 
and on "Wit and Humor." He tells us that "vapors natu- 
rally rise," and he would dispel them by ridicule. " The melan- 
choly way of treating religion is that which, according to my 
apprehension, renders it so tragical, and is the occasion of its 
acting in reality such dismal tragedies in the world." He 
would " recommend wisdom and virtue in the way of pleasantry 
and mirth," and tells us that " good-humor is not only the 
best security against enthusiasm, but the best foundation of 
piety and true religion." It does not appear very clearly what 
is the nature of the piety and religion which he would recom- 
mend. Sometimes he seems to scoff at the Scriptures, and at 
all their spiritual verities and holy mysteries ; at other times he 
would make it appear as if he wished to be thought a believer 
in Christianity. There is, I suspect, much of latent levity in 
the profession he makes : " We may in a proper sense be said 
faithfully and dutifully to embrace those holy mysteries even 
in their minutest particulars, and without the least exception 
on account of their amazing depth," " being," he adds, " fully 
assured of our own steady orthodoxy, resignation, and entire 
submission to the truly Christian and catholic doctrines of our 
holy church, as by law established." 

But he reckons these pleasantries merely as an introduction 
to graver subjects. He has largely caught the spirit of Locke, 
but he by no means follows him, especially in his rejection of 
innate ideas. " No one," says he, " has done more than Locke 
towards recalling of true philosophy from barbarity into the 
use and practice of the world, and into the company of the 
better and politer sort, who might well be ashamed of it in its 



Art. iv.] COMMON SENSE. 3 1 

other dress. No one has opened a better and clearer way to 
reason." But he qualifies his praise. " 'Twas Mr. Locke that 
struck at all fundamentals, threw all order and virtue out of 
the world, and made the ideas of these, which are the same with 
those of God, unnatural, and without foundation in our minds. 
Innate is a word he poorly plays upon : the right word, though 
less used, is connatural? He shows that there are many of 
our mental qualities natural to us. " Life, and the sensations 
which accompany life, come when they will, are from mere 
nature and nothing else. Therefore, if you dislike the word 
innate, let us change it, if you will, for instinct, and call instinct 
that which nature teaches, exclusive of art, culture, or disci- 
pline." Beginning with these lower affections, he goes on to 
show that " preconceptions of a higher kind have place in 
human kind, preconceptions ' of the ' fair and beautiful.' " x 

He reviews the famous argument of Descartes, " We think, 
therefore we are." " Nothing more certain : for the Ego or I 
being established in the first part of the proposition, the Ergo, 
no doubt, must hold it good in the latter." " For my own part," 
he adds, " I take my being upon trust." He everywhere appeals 
to the " Sensus Communis," or Common Sense. His general 
doctrine is thus expressed : " Some moral and philosophical 
truths there are withal so evident in themselves, that it would 
be easier to imagine half mankind to have run mad, and joined 
precisely in one and the same species of folly, than to admit 
any thing as truth which should be advanced against such nat- 
ural knowledge, fundamental reason, and common sense!' 2 He 
allows that what is natural to us may require labor and pains 
to bring it out. " Whatever materials or principles of this kind 
we may possibly bring with us, whatever good faculties, senses, 
or anticipating sensations and imaginations may be of nature's 
growth, and arise properly of themselves without our art, pro- 
motion, or assistance, the general idea which is formed of all 
this management, and the clear notion we attain of what is 
preferable and principal in all these subjects of choice and esti- 
mation, will not, as I imagine, by any person be taken for 

1 Letters to a student at the University. 

2 It was owing, I doubt not, to the influence, direct or indirect, of Shaftesbury 
that the phrase " common sense " came to be so much used by the Scottish 
School. 



32 SHAFTESBURY. [Art. iv. 

innate. Use, practice, and culture must precede the under- 
standing and wit of such an advanced size and growth as this." 
These surely are the very views which were developed more 
fully and articulately by Reid, in his opposition to the scepti- 
cism of Hume. 

The object of his works is to carry out these principles to 
taste and morals. " Nor do I ask more when I undertake to 
prove the reality of virtue and morals. If I be certain that I 
am, it is certain and demonstrable who and what I should be." 
" Should one who had the countenance of a gentleman ask me 
' why I would avoid being nasty when nobody was present ? ' in 
the first place, I should be fully satisfied that he himself was 
a very nasty gentleman who could ask this question, and that 
it would be a hard matter for me to make him ever conceive 
what true cleanliness was. However, I might, notwithstand- 
ing this, be contented to give him a slight answer, and say, ' It 
was because I had a nose.' Should he trouble me further, and 
ask again, ' What if I had a cold ? or what if naturally I had no 
such nice smell ? ' I might answer perhaps, * That I cared as 
little to see myself nasty as that others should see me in that 
condition.' ' But what if it were in the dark ? ' ' Why, even 
then, though I had neither nose nor eyes, my sense of the matter 
would still be the same : my nature would rise at the thought 
of what was sordid.' " He thus reaches a sense of beauty. 
" Much in the same manner have I heard it asked, ' Why should 
a man be honest in the dark ? ' " The answer to this question 
brings him to a moral sense. 

He speaks of nature in general, and human nature in partic- 
ular, as an "economy," and as having a "constitution" and 
a " frame." In examining the nature of the soul, he finds 
(i) self -affections, which lead only to " the good of the private." 
He enumerates, as belonging to this class, "love of life, resent- 
ment of injury, pleasure, or appetite towards nourishment and 
the means of generation ; interest, or the desire of those conven- 
iences by which we are well provided for or maintained ; emula- 
tion, or love of praise and honor ; indolence, or love of ease 
and rest." But he finds also (2) natural affections, which lead 
to the good of the public. He takes great pains to establish 
the existence of disinterested affections, and opposes the views 
of those who, like Rochefoucauld, would resolve all human action 



Art. iv.] NATURE OF VIRTUE. 33 

into a refined selfishness. Referring to the common saying, 
that interest governs the world, he remarks shrewdly : " Who- 
ever looks narrowly into the affairs of it, will find that passion, 
humor, caprice, zeal, faction, and a thousand other springs 
which are counter to self-interest, have as considerable a part 
in the movements of this machine. There are more wheels 
and counterpoises in this engine than are easily imagined." 
With such affections, " man is naturally social, and society is 
natural to him ; " and in illustrating this position, he sets him- 
self vigorously against the social theory of Hobbes, who repre- 
sents the original state of man as one of war. 

Virtue consists in the proper exercise of these two classes of 
affections. Vice arises when the public affections are weak and 
deficient, when the private affections are too strong, or affec- 
tions spring up which do not tend to the support of the public 
or private system. He shows that virtue, as consisting in these 
affections, is natural to man, and that he who practises it is 
obeying the ancient Stoic maxim, and living according to 
nature. The virtues which he recommends fall far beneath the 
stern standard of the Stoics, and leave out all the peculiar graces 
of Christianity : they consist of, — 4 'a mind subordinate to rea- 
son, a temper humanized and fitted to all natural affection, an 
exercise of friendship uninterrupted, thorough candor, benig- 
nity, and good-nature, with constant security, tranquillity, equa- 
nimity." 

He would establish a morality on grounds independent of 
religion. " Whoever thinks that there is a God, and pretends 
formally to believe that he is just and good, must suppose that 
there is, independently, such a thing as justice, truth, and false- 
hood, right and wrong, according to which he pronounces that 
God is just, righteous, and true." " If virtue be not really esti- 
mable in itself, I can see nothing estimable in following it for 
the sake of a bargain ; " and he complains of those who "speak 
so much of the rewards and punishments, and so little of the 
worth or value of the thing itself." He remarks very justly : 
" By building a future state on the ruins of virtue, religion in 
general, and the cause of a deity, is betrayed ; and by making 
rewards and punishments the principal motives to duty, the 
Christian religion in particular is overthrown, and its greatest 
principle, that of love, rejected and exposed." He admits, how- 

3 



34 SHAFTESBURY. [Art. iv. 

ever, that a good God, as a model, has an effect on our views 
of morals and conduct ; and allows that " fear of future punish- 
ment and hope of future reward, how mercenary and servile 
however it may be accounted, is yet, in many circumstances, a 
great advantage, security, and support to virtue." 

Such is his view of the nature of virtue. But Shaftesbury is 
quite aware that the question of the character of the virtuous 
act is not the same as that of the mental faculty which looks 
at it and appreciates it. This faculty he represents as being of 
the nature of a sense. Locke had allowed the existence of two 
senses, an external and an internal ; and had labored in vain 
to derive all men's ideas from these two sources. Hutcheson, 
perceiving that the inlets to the mind were too few according 
to the theory of Locke, calls in other senses. These senses 
become very numerous in the systems of some of the Scottish 
metaphysicians, such as Gerard. In the writings of Shaftes- 
bury, two occupy an important place, — the sense of beauty and 
the moral sense. 

" No sooner," he says, " does the eye open upon figures, the 
ear to sounds, than straight the Beautiful results, and grace 
and harmony are known and acknowledged. No sooner are 
actions viewed, no sooner the human affections and passions 
discerned (and they are most of them as soon discerned as felt), 
than straight an inward eye distinguishes and sees the fair 
and shapely, the amiable and admirable, apart from the deformed, 
the foul, the odious, or the despicable^ Though in all this 
advancing quite beyond the " Essay on the Human Under- 
standing," yet he seems to be anxious to connect his view of 
the moral sense with the reflection or inward sense of Locke. 
" In a creature capable of forming general notions of things, 
not only the outward beings which offer themselves to the sense 
are the objects of the affections, but the very actions them- 
selves, and the affections of pity, kindness, gratitude, and their 
contraries, being brought into the mind by reflection, become 
objects. So that by means of this reflected sense, there arises 
another kind of affection towards these very affections them- 
selves, which have been already felt, and are now become the 
subject of a new liking or dislike." Conscience is represented 
by him "as the reflection in the mind of any unjust action or 
behavior, which he knows to be naturally odious and ill-deserv- 



Art. iv.] INFLUENCE ON SCOTCH SCHOOL. 35 

ing. No creature can maliciously and intentionally do ill, with- 
out being sensible, at the same time, that he deserves ill. And 
in this respect, every sensible creature may be said to have a 
conscience." : 

He has evidently been smitten with some of the Platonic 
views of beauty. "We have," he says, "a sense of order and 
proportion ; and having a sensation, reason can give this account 
of it, that whatever things have order, the same have unity of 
design and concur in one, are parts constituent of one whole, 
or are in themselves one system. Such is a tree with all its 
branches, an animal with all its members, an edifice with all 
exterior and interior ornaments." He is fond of connecting or 
identifying the beautiful and the good ; in fact, virtue is repre- 
sented by him as a higher kind of beauty. " It is, I must own, 
on certain relations or respective proportions, that all natural 
affection does in some measure depend." " The same numbers, 
harmony, and proportions have a place in morals." He evi- 
dently clings fondly to the idea that " beauty and good are one 
and the same." 

We have given so full an account of the philosophy of Shaftes- 
bury, because of the influence which it exercised on the 
Scottish Philosophy. Francis Hutcheson did little more than 
expound these views, with less versatility, but in a more equa- 
ble, thorough, and systematic manner. Turnbull, who founded 
the Aberdeen branch of the school, and influenced greatly the 
mind of Reid, avowedly drew largely from Hutcheson in his 
theories of taste and virtue. Reid and Beattie got their favor- 
ite phrase, " common sense," I have no doubt, directly or indi- 
rectly from the treatise so entitled in the " Characteristics." 
Hume was evidently well acquainted with the writings of 

1 The intelligent reader will see how much indebted Bishop Butler was to 
Shaftesbury, for the views propounded in his " Sermons on Human Nature." 
Shaftesbury, before Butler, had spoken of human nature as a "constitution," and 
had shown that to live according to nature implies a respect to the conscience. 
He complains of those who speak much of nature, without explaining its meaning 
(" Wit and Humor," iii. 2). He had divided our affections into personal and pub- 
lic and the moral power, and represented that power as a principle of reflection. 
Butler goes beyond Shaftesbury in showing that our personal affections are not 
in themselves selfish, and that the moral faculty is not only in our soul, but 
claims supremacy there. Butler declines to say whether the moral faculty is a 
a sense, or what else ; and he will not say that moral good consists in benevo- 
lence. 



36 GERSHOM CARMICHAEL. [Art. v. 

Shaftesbury ; and I am inclined to think that they may have 
helped to form his style, and to suggest some of his essays. 
We have an anticipation of the spirit of Hume in the miscel- 
lany entitled, " Philocles to Palemon : " " You know that in 
this Academic Philosophy I am to present you with, there is a 
certain way of questioning and doubting, which in no way suits 
the genius of our age. Men love to take party instantly. They 
can't bear being kept in suspense. The examination torments 
them." Theocles observes, that " if there be so much disorder 
in the present state of things, he would not be disposed to think 
better of the future." Lord Monboddo declares that " Shaftes- 
bury's Inquiry is the best book in English on the subject of 
morals." His Draught or Tablature of the Judgment of Her- 
cules, and his Disquisitions on Taste, originated the theories of 
Beauty which formed an essential part of Scottish metaphysics 
for more than a century. 



V. — GERSHOM CARMICHAEL. 

Sir William Hamilton says that Gershom Carmichael "may 
be regarded, on good grounds, as the real founder of the Scottish 
school of philosophy." (" Reid's Works," p. 30.) I am dis- 
posed to retain the honor for Francis Hutcheson, to whom it 
is usually ascribed. Carmichael does not possess the full char- 
acteristics of the school. He seems to me to be the bond which 
connects the old philosophy with the new in Scotland. 

He was descended from a genuine covenanting stock. His 
father was Alexander Carmichael, the son of Frederick Car- 
michael, who had been minister in various places in Fifeshire, 
and who died in 1667 ; his mother was relict (she had been 
the second wife) of Fraser of Bray. Alexander was minister 
at Pittenain, and had at one time been attached to prelacy, but 
abandoned it to join the suffering ministers. Early in 1672, 
he is in the tolbooth of Edinburgh. On February 22, he is 
before the Council, charged with keeping conventicles, and is 
ordered to depart the kingdom, never to return without license ; 
and February 26, he is transported in a ship to London, where 



Art. v.] HIS LIFE. 37 

he was useful as a minister, and died about the year 1676 or 
1677. In 1677, shortly after his death, there was published, 
from the copy which he had left, a treatise, entitled, "The Be- 
liever's Mortification of Sin by the Spirit," edited by Thomas 
Lye, who says in the preface, " As for that flesh of his flesh, 
and the fruit of his loins, as for that Ruth and Gershom he 
hath left behind him, I question not but as long as the saints 
among you continue to bear your old name, Philadelphia (so 
the old Puritans of England have used to style you), you will 
not, you cannot, forget to show kindness to Mephibosheth for 
Jonathan's sake." Gershom, so called by his father because 
he was " a stranger in a strange land," seems to have been born 
in London about 1672. It may be supposed that the family 
returned to Scotland after the father's death. We certainly 
find Gershom enrolled a Master of Arts in the University of 
Edinburgh, July 31, 1691. He afterwards became Regent at 
St. Andrews, where he took the oath of allegiance, and sub- 
scribed the Assurance. On November 22, 1694, he is elected 
and admitted Master in the University of Glasgow, having been 
brought in by public dispute, that is, by disputation on com- 
parative trial, through the influence of Lord Carmichael, after- 
wards the first Earl of Hyndford. About the same time he 
lost his mother, and " married a good woman, the daughter of 
Mr. John Inglis." Wodrow, who tells us this (" Letters "), was 
his pupil, and describes him as at that time possessed of little 
reading, as dictating several sheets of peripatetic physics de 
materia prima, as teaching Rohault, and being very much a Car- 
tesian, — this seven years after the publication of Newton's 
" Principia." Afterwards he made himself master of the mathe- 
matics and the new philosophy, and Wodrow used to jest with 
him on this matter of his juvenile teaching. From these no- 
tices it appears that, by parentage and birth and training and 
ancestral prepossessions, he belongs to the seventeenth, but 
catches the spirit of the eighteenth century. He exhibits in 
his own personal history the transition from the old to the new 
thought of Scotland. 

He is represented as a hard student, a thinking, poring man, 
his favorite study being moral philosophy. At the commence- 
ment of his professorial life, a Master took up the batch of stu- 
dents as they entered on the study of philosophy, and carried 



38 GERSHOM CARMICHAEL. [Art. v. 

them in successive years through all the branches, including 
logic, pneumatology, moral philosophy, and natural philosophy. 
This system required the teacher to be a well-informed man 
in various departments, but was a hinderance to eminence in 
any one branch of learning. But from 1727 the Masters are 
restricted to their several classes, and to Carmichael is con- 
signed moral philosophy. It appears that, in 1726, there were 
thirty-six students in the third year's class, and nineteen in that 
of the fourth year ; in the latter days of Carmichael the num- 
bers were larger. The classes were swelled by non-conforming 
students from England, who, shut out from the English univer- 
sities by their tests and their churchified influence, betook 
themselves to the Scottish colleges. Many of these were 
attracted to Glasgow by the fame of Carmichael. The college 
session lasted from the beginning of November to the end of 
May. On the Lord's day, the Masters met with their classes, 
to take an account of the sermons, and this was a work in which 
Carmichael felt a special interest. 

Carmichael was a most affectionate, friendly man, but withal 
a little warm in his temper, and became involved in conse- 
quence in scenes which seem somewhat inconsistent with the 
supposed calm of an academic life. The college corporation 
was evidently much agitated by internal feuds, and Carmichael 
takes his part in them, commonly siding with the party of inde- 
pendence against the Principal. In 1704, joined by Mr. Lou- 
don, he protests that several things minuted as Acts of Faculty 
were writen and signed privately by the Principal. The Fac- 
ulty finds the charge unfounded, and suspends the two from 
their functions. Subsequently they ask forgiveness, and are 
restored. In 1705, Mr. Law, one of the Regents, complains 
that some expressions had been uttered against him by Mr. 
Carmichael, who is gravely admonished, and exhorted to avoid 
every thing irritating towards his colleagues in time to come. 
In 1 71 7, there are hot disputes as to who should elect the Rec- 
tor. The Masters combine against the Principal, call the stu- 
dents to the common hall, and choose their man. But, in 171 8, 
the Commission for the Visitation of the College finds some 
of the Masters, including Carmichael, guilty of great disorder in 
the election of the Rector ; and they are discharged for a time 
from exercising any part of their office (such as choosing pro- 



Art. v.] GLASGOW UNIVERSITY. 39 

fessors), except the ordinary discipline in the class. In 1722, 
a bonfire was kindled by the students on a decision in favor of 
the election of Lord Molesworth (we shall meet with him again 
in these articles) to Parliament, and Carmichael rushes into the 
heart of the mob, and gets into trouble in extinguishing the 
flames. In November, 1728, we find him joining in a protest 
against the claim of the Chancellor to sit and vote. It was by 
such disputes that the constitution of the Scottish colleges 
came to be settled. 

Patriotic exertions helped to relieve the sameness of the col- 
lege life, and in these the collegiate body in Glasgow (it was 
different in Aberdeen) are of one mind. In 1 708, the kingdom 
is threatened with "an invasion of French and Irish papists," 
and the Masters agree each to maintain a number of foot sol- 
diers ; and Carmichael signs for five men. In September, 171 5, 
the rising in the north of Scotland in favor of the pretender 
becomes known. The Faculty agrees to raise fifty men at six- 
pence a day ; the Principal provides eight, the professor of 
divinity five, and Carmichael subscribes for four. It was by 
such active exertions in the south of Scotland that the progress 
of the Rebellion was so speedily arrested. 

In his later years, as he became known, Carmichael carried 
on a correspondence with Barbeyrac and other learned men. 
He had a numerous family, "who were all a comfort to him, 
except one, who was a cause of great distress." Wodrow says, 
that " in his advanced years he was singularly religious. I 
know he was under great depths of soul exercise, and much 
the worse that he did not communicate his distress to anybody 
almost." This is the only record we have of a Scottish meta- 
physician having had his " soul exercises ; " but surely there 
must have been others who had their conflicts as they dived 
into the depths of the human soul. For the last two or three 
years of his life, he had a cancerous wart, which spread over 
one eye and across his nose to the other eye, and at last carried 
him off. During all his illness he remained a hard student and 
serious Christian. He died, November 25, 1729. On his 
death the English students leave the university, the attendance 
at which is reported by Wodrow as very thin in December; 
and it does not seem to improve till Hutcheson commences his 
lectures in the following October. 



40 * GERSHOM CARMICHAEL. [Art. v. 

Carmichael published " Breviuscula Introductio ad Logicam," 
which reached a second edition in 1722. He defines logic as 
the science which shows the method of discovering truth, and 
of expounding it to others. He represents it as having to do 
with judgment, but then it also treats of apprehension as nec- 
essary to judgment. Under apprehension he speaks of the 
doctrine of the difference of the comprehension and extension 
of a notion, and of the former being evolved by definition, and 
the latter by division, as being quite commonplace. He distin- 
guishes between immediate and mediate judgment. Immediate 
is between two ideas immediately compared ; mediate, in which 
the comparison is by means of a third judgment, is called 
discourse. He says all knowledge may ultimately be resolved 
into immediate judgments, known in their own light ; and he 
divides immediate judgments into two classes : one abstract, in 
which there is no direction of the mind to the thing itself as 
really existing, e. g. } the whole is greater than a part ; and the 
other intuitive, when the mind has a consciousness of the thing 
as present, as, for example, the proposition, Ego cogitans crista. 
Coming to mediate judgment, he gives as the supreme rule of 
affirmative syllogism the axiom, "Things which are the same 
with one and the same third are the same with one another ; "' 
and of negative syllogisms the axiom, " Things of which one is 
the same with a third, and the other not the same, are not the 
same with one another.'* These statements show a " thinking, 
poring," man, and will be valued most by those who have 
thought longest on these subjects. YVe see a new historical 
step in the transmission of the distinction between the exten- 
sion and comprehension of a notion ; we see that the difference 
between immediate and mediate judgments was known in these 
times ; and that there was an attempt to rind a supreme rule of 
mediate reasoning in the sameness (here lies the looseness) of 
two things with a third. Carmichael is aware that there are 
propositions seen to be true in their own light ; and that there 
is an intuitive apprehension, in which the thing is known as 
present ; and man)' will think that the ego cogitans crista is a 
preferable form to the cogito ergo sum of Descartes. 

Carmichael published an edition of Puffendorf, " De Officio 
Hominis et Civis," with Xotes and Supplements, for the use of 
students, described by Hutcheson as more valuable than the 



Art. v.] HIS NATURAL THEOLOGY. 41 

original work. In the notes he offers many acute observations, 
and gives extracts from De Vries, Titius, and Grotius. In the 
first supplement he speaks of a divine law, to which all morality 
has reference, which alone obliges, and to which all obligation 
of human laws is ultimately to be referred. The law may be 
made known either by means of signs, oral or written, or by 
the constitution of human nature, and other things which offer 
themselves to the observation of men. What is known by the 
latter is called natural law, which has two meanings, — one the 
faculty of reason itself as given to man by God, and the other 
such a power of intelligence as can discover what is in nature 
by ordinary diligence. He takes far higher grounds of religion 
than those adopted by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. He de- 
clares that no one can be said to obey the law who does not 
know what the law enjoins, or who acts without reference to 
God and his law. At the same time, he seems to be a eudai- 
monist, and inclined to look on God as having an ultimate 
respect to happiness in his law. He has a second supplement, 
calm, moderate, and sensible, on the " Duties of Man towards 
his own Mind," and a third on " Quasi-Contracts." 

His latest work, published in 1729, shortly before his death, 
is " Synopsis Theologiae Naturalis." In his preface he tells us 
that, in teaching pneumatology, he had used two Belgian text- 
books. He advises that the forms of the Aristotelian school be 
avoided, as obscure and artificial, but declares at the same time 
that the doctrines of the scholastics, at least of the older, are 
more agreeable to reason and holy Scripture than those opposed 
to them in his day, especially in their finding a foundation for 
morality and obligation in God ; and he denounces some who, 
of late years, with a showy appearance of genius and eloquence, 
would separate morality from religion, referring, I should sup- 
pose, to the school of Shaftesbury, against which, therefore, he 
thus gives his dying testimony, as it were in the name of the 
old philosophy. 

In establishing the existence and perfections of God, he draws 
arguments from a variety of sources. He would call in meta- 
physical principles. Thus he urges that there must be ens 
aliquod independens, otherwise we are landed in an infinite 
series of causes, which he declares (with Aristotle) self-evidently 
impossible. He appeals, with the French theologian Abbadie, 



42 ANDREW BAXTER. [Art. vi. 

to universal consent But he reckons the arguments of Des- 
cartes and De Vries, and that by Samuel Clarke, as unsatisfac- 
tory. He maintains that we can argue that what we attribute 
to a thing in idea exists, only after we have shown that the 
thing exists. He maintains that the existence of God as an 
existing being is to be established, not a priori, but a posterioi'i, 
and appeals to the traces of order, beauty, and design in the 
universe, and to the illustrations to be found in the writings of 
Ray, Pelling, Cheyne, Derham, Niewentite, and in Pitcairn on 
the Circulation of the Blood. He refers to the properties of 
matter, as established by Newton ; and argues, as Baxter did so 
resolutely afterwards, that matter cannot move of itself, but 
needs a new force impressed on it. In regard to the depend- 
ence of creature on created power, he holds that things spirit- 
ual and corporeal exist so long as they have being from the 
creative efficacy of God, and speaks of the need of a divine 
precursits or concursus. He admits, however, that created 
spirits have efficacy in themselves. He refers to Leibnitz, and 
shows that he was well acquainted with his theory of possible 
worlds. It is surely interesting to observe a modest and retir- 
ing Scottish writer so thoroughly acquainted with the highest 
philosophy of his time, British and Continental, and yet retain- 
ing his own independence in the midst of his learning. If he 
cannot be regarded as the founder of the new school, he has 
the credit of judiciously combining some of the best properties 
of the old and new philosophy. 



VI.— ANDREW BAXTER. 

Baxter cannot be justly described as a leader or a follower of the Scottish 
school. His method is not really nor professedly that of inductive obser- 
vation. He belongs rather to the school of Samuel Clarke, to whom he 
often refers, and always with admiration. But he was a Scotchman, and 
an independent thinker : he does not belong to the old philosophy ; but he 
was a contemporary of the men who founded the Scottish school, and treated 
of many of the same topics. He had readers both in England and Scot- 
land in his own day, and for some years after his death ; and he deserves 
a passing notice as the representative of a style of thought which met with 
considerable favor in his time, but had to give way before the new school. 



Art. vi.] HIS LIFE. 43 

We have a life of him in Kippis's " Biographia Britannica," drawn up 
from materials supplied by his son. He was the son of a merchant in Old 
Aberdeen, where he was born in 1686 or 1687. His mother was Elizabeth 
Frazer, descended from a considerable family in the north. He was edu- 
cated at King's College, Aberdeen, where, at the beginning of last century, 
he would be trained in the old logic and metaphysics. But, as we shall 
see more fully in future articles, a considerable amount of a fresh literary 
taste, and of a spirit of philosophical inquiry, began to spring up in Aber- 
deen in connection with the two Universities pretty early in that century. 
Baxter, besides being a good mathematician, was well acquainted with the 
discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, and with the theories of Leibnitz as to 
matter and motion. He was familiar with the Essay on the Human Un- 
derstanding, but had a deeper appreciation of the speculations of Clarke. 

The chief professional employment of his life was that of tutor to young 
men of good family. The boys who, in our days, would be sent to the 
great public schools of England taught by Oxford or Cambridge masters, 
were very often, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, put under 
tutors, who went about with them to the colleges at home, or travelled with 
them abroad. The occupation of teaching and travelling tutor was one 
coveted by young men of limited means and of a reading taste, who did not 
wish officially to enter the church, and had no other office open tp them 
than that referred to, fitted to furnish them with means of study. When the 
tutor had trained and travelled with the heir of a good estate, the family felt 
bound to make provision for him for life. It was thus that, in the seven- 
teenth century, Hobbes had been tutor to two successive Earls of Devon- 
shire ; that, in the eighteenth century, Thomson the poet became tutor to 
the Lord Chancellor Talbot's son on the Grand Tour ; that Hume coveted 
the office of travelling tutor to Murray of Broughton ; and Turnbull and A. 
Smith gave up chairs in the Scottish colleges to become tutors, — the one to 
the Wauchopes of Niddrie (?) and the other to the Duke of Buccleuch. 
Baxter was tutor, among others, to Lord John Gray, Lord Blantyre, and 
Mr. Hay of Drummelzier. 

In the spring of 1741, he went abroad with Mr. Hay, having also Lord 
Blantyre under his care. He resided some years at Utrecht, and thence 
made excursions into Flanders, France, and Germany. Carlyle met him 
— " Immateriality Baxter," as he calls him — at Utrecht in 1745, and says 
of him, "though he was a profound philosopher and a hard student, he was 
at the same time a man of the world, and of such pleasing conversation as 
attracted the young." His son had described him as being at polite assem- 
blies in Holland, and a favorite of ladies ; but a writer in the Corrigenda of 
the following volume of the " Biographia," after mentioning that he saw him 
daily for more than two years at Utrecht, declares : " His dress was plain 
and simple, — not that of a priggish Frenchman, but of a mathematician 
who was not a sloven. I am pretty well persuaded that, while in the Low 
Countries, he never had any conversation with women of higher or lower 
degree, unless it were to ask for the bill at an ordinary, or desire the ser- 
vant-maid to bring up the turf for his chimney." The same writer describes 
him as a "plain, decent, good-humored man, who passed all his time, but 



44 ANDREW BAXTER. [Art. vi. 

what was bestowed at his meals, in meditation and study." His son 
describes him as social and cheerful, and extremely studious, sometimes 
sitting up whole nights reading and writing. 

In 1724, he had married the daughter of Mr. Mebane, a minister in Ber- 
wickshire ; and, while he was abroad, his wife and family seem to have 
resided at Berwick-on-Tweed. In 1747, he returned to Scotland, and 
resided till his death at Whittingham, in East Lothian, where he employed 
himself in country affairs, and in his philosophic studies. In his latter 
years, he was much afflicted with gout and gravel. In January 29, 1750, he 
wrote to (the afterwards notorious) John Wilkes, with whom he had formed 
a friendship in Holland, " I am a trouble to all about me, especially my 
poor wife, who has the life of a slave night and day in helping to take care 
of a diseased carcass." He had long, he states, considered the advantages 
of a separate state, but " I shall soon know more than all men I leave 
behind me." He died April 13, 1750, and was buried in the family vault of 
Mr. Hay at Whittingham. 

He wrote a book in two volumes entitled " Matho," being a compend of the 
universal scientific knowledge of the day. He published his principal 
work, "An Inquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul," in 1733, 1 and it 
reached a second edition in 1737. In 1750, shortly after his death, was 
published, "An Appendix to his Inquiry into the Nature of the Human 
Soul." He had taken a great body of manuscripts with him to Holland ; in 
the letter referred to, he speaks fondly of his unfinished manuscripts, in 
which he had discussed " a great many miscellaneous subjects in philosophy 
of a very serious nature, few of them ever considered before, as I know of." 
In 1779, the Rev. Dr. Duncan of South Warnborough published from his 
manuscripts, after correcting the style, " The Evidence of Reason in proof 
of the Immortality of the Soul," and at the close is his letter to Wilkes. 
Another work of his, entitled " Histor," discussing, on the English side, the 
controversy between the British and Continental writers as to force, and on 
the side of Clarke, the controversy between Clarke and Leibnitz, was 
offered to Millar the bookseller ; but the new generation did not appreciate 
his life-labors ; his day was over, and the offer was declined. 

The avowed design of Baxter, in all his works, is to establish the exist- 
ence of an immaterial power. Such a defence seemed to him to be required, 
in consequence of the new views of the powers of matter founded on the 
discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton ; by the equivocal language of Locke, fre- 
quently quoted about our not being "able to know whether any material 
being thinks or not ; " and by the materialistic spirit abroad. The new 
doctrine of all matter attracting other matter seemed to show that we must 
be prepared to modify the old doctrine, that body is altogether passive. 
Leibnitz, on metaphysical grounds, and in opposition to the accepted Carte- 

1 Stewart was not "able to discover the date of the first edition," and others 
have been as unsuccessful. It is criticised in Jackson's " Dissertation on Matter 
and Spirit," 1735, and referred to in " Bibliotheque Raisonnee des Ouvrages des 
Savans," for April, May, and June, 1735. But the question is settled by its appear- 
ing (as a friend has shown us) in the " Gentleman's Magazine," in the register of 
books published October, 1733. 



Art. vi.] HIS VIEW OF MATTER. 45 

sian doctrine, had maintained that matter has an essential potency. Bax- 
ter proceeds on the doctrine of Clarke, the friend of Newton, and quotes 
his language. "All things that are done in the world are done either 
immediately by God himself, or by created intelligent beings ; matter being 
evidently not at all capable of any laws or powers whatsoever, any more 
than it is capable of intelligence, excepting only this one negative power, 
that every part of it will always and necessarily continue in that state, 
whether of rest or motion, wherein it at present is. So that all those things 
which we commonly say are the effects of the natural powers of matter and 
laws of motion, of gravitation, attraction, or the like, are indeed (if one will 
speak strictly and properly) the effects of God's acting continually and 
every moment, either immediately by himself, or mediately by some created 
intelligent being." The first volume of Baxter's work on the " Nature of 
the Soul," his "Appendix," and a large part of his "Evidence," are mainly 
occupied with a full elucidation and elaborate defence of the views summa- 
rily expressed in this passage. 

He labors to prove that a vis inertia, or resistance to a change of present 
state of rest or motion, is essential to matter ; that matter hath this and 
nothing else ; that it cannot have any sort of active power ; that what are 
called the powers of matter is force impressed upon it ab extra. He main- 
tains that matter is "liable to but one change or casualty, viz., to be annihil- 
ated, or to be destroyed by a Being to whose power that effect is competent," 
and he denies that Infinite Power may " superadd a property to a substance 
incapable of receiving it." He maintains this doctrine as resolutely as if 
it were the foundation of religion, which must stand or fall with it. The 
questions which he has taken up had been discussed in a profound manner 
by Descartes and Leibnitz, and they cannot be regarded as settled at this 
day. But from his dogma of the impotency of matter he argues the neces- 
sity of an immaterial powerful being who first made the dead substance, 
matter, who originally impressed, and still continues to impress, motion 
upon it. " I am of opinion, and think it would be easy to show it, if one 
had leisure to run through the several particulars, that unless an immaterial 
power, continually re-excited motion in the material universe, all would 
stop in it in a very short time, perhaps in half an hour, except that the 
planets would run out in straight-lined directions " ! ! " To say that Deity 
interposes when he sees that matter would go wrong, is the same thing, in 
other words, as owning that he interposes always if that were proper. Every 
particle of matter resists a change of its present state, and therefore could 
not effect a change of state in itself nor in other particles." He would 
thus establish his conclusion, that the " Deity, who can be excluded from 
no place, but is active and present everywhere, acts immediately on all the 
parts of matter," and that his governing is only his creating power con- 
stantly repeated. " Our philosophy can only be consistent when we take in 
the immediate power of the Creator as the efficient cause in all the works of 
nature." He looks on his own position as being very much superior, in its 
religious aspects, to the doctrines which had been entertained by many 
others. " Low and pitiful are the shifts we are put to when we would 
remove the Deity to the head of nature, and the head of nature out of sight." 



46 ANDREW BAXTER. [Art. vi. 

" It is not right to exalt the Deity in words and derogate from his perfec- 
tions in facts. This is only paying him a compliment, and then setting aside 
his government in whole or in part, — a state artifice. Cicero objects this low 
cunning to Epicurus, when he says, it is "verbis ponere re tollere." " Des- 
cartes, before Spinoza, had given the government of the universe to matter 
and motion ; and Leibnitz, under a pretence of extolling the original con- 
trivance of things, leaves the execution of all this to dead substance. Ac- 
cording to all these schemes, we see nothing that the Deity does now : we 
behold only the operations of matter. This fills the mind with anxious 
doubts. If matter performs all that is wonderful, it catches our first admi- 
ration ; and we know not where to search for the being who contrived that 
which we see matter executes with such dexterity. 1 ' Much may be said in 
favor of the doctrine, that God acts in all physical action ; but it is wiser not 
to found it on the peculiar dogma of Baxter, that matter is inactive. 

But the grand aim of Baxter, in depriving matter of its powers, is to 
establish the immateriality, and consequent immortality, of the soul. It is 
a fundamental position with him, that "a power always belongs to some- 
thing living." He is thus able to establish the existence of a human soul 
active and immortal. He maintains that " no substance or being can have 
a natural tendency to annihilation or become nothing," and argues that the 
" soul must endlessly abide an active perceptive substance, without either 
fear or hopes of dying, through all eternity." When we find such positions 
coolly assumed, one almost feels justified in rejoicing that in that very age 
David Hume rose up to dispute all such dogmas ; and that in the following 
age Emmanuel Kant examined narrowly the foundations both of rational 
theology and of rational psychology. We are certainly warranted in feeling 
a high gratification that Thomas Reid, a wiser man than any of these, did 
immediately after the time of Hume, and before the time of Kant, set about 
establishing natural religion and philosophy upon a safer foundation. 

Baxter is prepared to follow out his principles to all their consequences, 
however preposterous they might appear. The phenomena of dreaming 
came in his way, and he gives an explanation of them. He cannot refer 
these dreams to dead matter, nor can it be the soul that forms the scenes 
present to it. His theory is, that separate immaterial beings act upon the 
matter of our bodies, and produce on the sensory a (puvraa/ua or vision, which 
is perceived by the active and recipient mind. He acknowledges that he 
knows nothing of the conditions and circumstances of these separate agen- 
cies, but he evidently clings to the idea that there is no scarcity of living 
immaterial beings, and asks triumphantly : " Why so much dead matter, 
without living immaterial substance in proportion ? " " Hath not the most 
despicable reptile animalcule an immaterial soul joined to it?" 

It ought to be added, that in his " Evidence " he adduces stronger argu- 
ments, than those derived from his favorite view of matter, in favor of the 
soul's immortality. He shows that if there be no state beyond the grave, 
our existence is incomplete, without design, irrelative ; and he calls in the 
divine perfections as furnishing '* a certain ground of confidence that our 
existence will not be finally broken off in the midst of divine purposes thus 
visibly unfinished here," and securing that beings 



Art. vi.] HIS VIEW OF THE SOUL. 47 

something should not instantly become nothing." In arguing thus, he 
shows his besetting tendency to take up extreme positions ; for he maintains 
that in our world pain is much more extensive in its nature than pleasure, 
and that all bodily pleasures are merely instigations of pains. He argues 
that as in this world reason may often be disobeyed with no evil conse- 
quences and obeyed without any good ones, so there must be a future world 
to make every thing consistent with reason. He shows that the preposses- 
sions of mankind are in favor of this tenet. " In the very dawnings of rea- 
son, let a child be told what is death, having no idea of any way of existing 
beside the present, amazement seizes him: he is perplexed, uneasy, dis- 
mayed.'" He is met, as so many others have been, by the objection, that 
most of these arguments would prove that brutes are immortal. In answer- 
ing it, he is obliged to allow that immortality does not depend solely on 
immateriality, and to throw himself on the moral argument, which does not 
apply to brutes, which, not being moral agents, are not capable of rewards 
and punishments. But it is clear that he cherishes the idea that the imma- 
terial part of brutes, while not constituting the same conscious being, may 
not perish ultimately when separated from the material frame. 

In treating of these favorite topics, he discusses a great many important 
philosophic questions, and always gives a clear and decided opinion. He 
evidently favors the arguments derived from "abstract reason and the nat- 
ure of things 1 ' in behalf of the divine existence. He argues the necessity 
of an infinitely perfect intelligent being, — not only from space and time, as 
Clarke did, but from " the necessity of eternal truth in geometry or in other 
abstract sciences.' 1 " Truth is not a being existing by itself, and therefore 
the immutable necessary nature of truth must be referred to some being 
existing of itself, and existing immutably and eternally." We have only to 
define truth as the conformity of our ideas to things, to see the fallacy lurk- 
ing in this argument. 

His view of space and time is taken from Newton and Clarke. He repre- 
sents them as not beings, but the affections of beings : "And as time and 
space are not existences, so their correlate infinites (if I may say so), that 
is, eternity and immensity, are not existences, but the properties of neces- 
sary existence. 1 ' In some other of his statements, he goes back to some of 
the mystic statements of the schoolmen, and anticipates some of the doc- 
trines of Kant. " God's existence is unsuccessive." He says, " Nunc stans 
implies opposite ideas, if applied to our existence ; but if we allow an eter- 
nal and immutable mind, the distinction of past and future vanishes with 
respect to such a mind, and the phrase has propriety." But surely there is 
an inconsistency in first arguing the divine existence from our ideas of space 
and time, and then declaring that our ideas in regard to space and time do 
not apply to Deity. 

In maintaining that mind is ever active, he has to consider its seeming 
dormancy in sleep. " The soul in sleep seems to suffer something like 
what happens to a live coal covered up under ashes ; which is alive all the 
while, but only appears so when disencumbered and exposed to open air." 
As to what has since been called unconscious mental action, his theory of 
it is the same as that defended in after years by D. Stewart ; he supposes 



4§ ANDREW BAXTER. [Art. yi. 

that the mind was conscious of its action at the time, but that the memory 
could not recall it. " There is certainly a great deal of our past conscious- 
ness which we retain no memory of afterwards. It is a particular part of 
our finite and imperfect nature, that we cannot become conscious of all our 
past consciousness at pleasure. But no man at night would infer that he 
was not in a state of consciousness and thinking at such* a certain minute, 
about twelve o'clock of the day, because now perhaps he hath no memory 
what particular thought he had at that minute. And it is no better argument, 
considered in itself, that a man was not conscious at such a minute in his 
sleep because next morning he hath no memory of what ideas were in his 
mind then." 

Baxter was most earnest in restricting the properties of matter, but he 
was equally resolute in maintaining its existence. In his work on the soul 
he has a long section on " Dean Berkeley's scheme." He was one of the 
first who examined systematically the new theory. He takes the obvious 
and vulgar view of it, and not the refined one ascribed to the ingenious 
author by his admirers : for those who have opposed Berkeley have usu- 
ally given one account of his system, while those who have defended him 
have usually given another ; and some have thence come to the conclusion, 
that his whole theory is so ethereal that it is not capable ot definite expres- 
sion. Baxter maintains that " we perceive, besides our sensations them- 
selves, the objects of them ; " that " we are conscious not only of sensation 
excited, but that it is excited by some cause beside ourselves," and that 
"such objects as rivers, houses, mountains, are the very things we perceive 
by sense." He endeavors to prove that the system of Berkeley carried out 
consistently would land us in a solitary egoism, for " we only collect con- 
cerning the souls of other men from the spontaneous motions and actions of 
their bodies ; these, according to him, belong to nothing." Berkeley had 
boasted that, by expelling matter out of nature, he had dragged with it so 
many sceptical and impious notions ; Baxter replies that this " puts us into 
a way of denying all things, that we may get rid of the absurdity of those 
who deny some things," — " as if one should advance that the best way for 
a woman who may silence those who attack her reputation is to turn a com- 
mon prostitute." He thinks that the doctrine may tend to remove the 
checks to immorality ; for " he who thinks theft, murder, or adultery noth- 
ing real beyond bare idea, and that for aught we know he injures nobody, 
will be surely under less restraint to satisfy his inclinations of any kind." 
The mathematician is evidently annoyed and vexed at the attacks which 
Berkeley had made on his science, and shows "that if there be no such 
thing as quantity, we have a large body of immutable truths conversant 
about an impossible object." 

In examining Berkeley, he gives his views of sense-perception, which are 
not so clear and satisfactory as those of Reid ; but are vastly juster than 
those of his contemporaries. He distinctly separates himself from those 
who hold that the mind can perceive nothing but its own states. " If our 
ideas have no parts, and yet if we perceive parts, it is plain we perceive 
something more than our own perceptions." He adds "We are as con- 
scious that we perceive parts as that we have perceptions at all." " The 



Art. vii.] FRANCIS HUTCHESON. 49 

existence of matter in general, or at least of material sensories to which the 
soul is united, seems to me to be nearer intuitive than demonstrative knowl- 
edge." He declares that the " same perception of parts proves to us both 
the spirit and a material agency.' 1 This is so far an anticipation of the doc- 
trine of Hamilton as an advance upon that of Reid. As to the manner of 
the action of matter on spirit, and spirit on matter, he says, in the very spirit 
of Reid, "We are certain this is matter of fact in many instances, whether 
we conceive it or not." He adds, in his own manner : " The Deity himself 
moves matter in almost all the phenomena of nature, and the soul of man 
perhaps moves some matter of the body, though in an infinitely less 
degree." 



VII. — FRANCIS HUTCHESON 1 

During the greater part of the seventeenth century there was 
a constant immigration into the north-east of Ireland of Scotch- 
men, who carried with them their hardy mode of life and perse- 
vering habits ; their love of education and their anxiety to have 
an educated ministry ; their attachment to the Bible and the 
simple Presbyterian worship. This movement commenced with 
the attempt of the first James of England to civilize Ireland by 
the Plantation of Ulster, and was continued during the period 
of the prelatic persecution in Scotland, whereby not a few sturdy 
adherents of the Solemn League and Covenant were driven for 
refuge to the sister isle. The Scottish Church kept a watchful 
guardianship over her scattered children, and sent after them a 
succession of ministers to preach the gospel, for a time in the 
Established Church, and, when churchmen from England 
(such as Jeremy Taylor) would not tolerate this any longer, 
to set up a Presbyterian organization. Among these was the 
Rev. Alexander Hutcheson, the second son of an old and 
respectable family at Monkwood, in Ayrshire, who became min- 
ister at Saintfield, in the heart of county Down, and purchased 
the townland of Drumalig. His second son, John, was settled 
at Ballyrea, within two miles of Armagh, and ministered to a 
Presbyterian congregation in the archiepis.opal city, where he 

1 " Account of the Life, Writings, and Character of Francis Hutcheson," by 
William Leechman, D.D., prefixed to Hutcheson's "Moral Philosophy;" Car- 
lyle's "Autobiography;" MSS. Letters from Hutcheson to Dr. Drennan, &c. 

4 



50 FRANCIS HUTCHESON. [Art. vii. 

was known by his church as a man of retiring habits and of 
superior abilities, and a firm supporter of Calvinistic doctrine. 
His second son, Francis, was born Aug. 8, 1694, it is said in 
his grandfather's house in Drumalig. 1 When about eight years 
of age, he (with his elder brother, Hans) was put under the 
care of the same grandfather, and attended a classical school 
kept by Mr. Hamilton in the " meeting-house " at Saintfield. 
He was afterwards sent to Killyleagh, in the same county, to 
an academy kept by the Rev. James Macalpin, said to be a man 
of virtue and ability, and who taught the future metaphysician 
the scholastic philosophy. We have it on record, that the Pres- 
byterian Church of Ireland — seeking now, after coming through 
a long period of harassment and trouble, to work out its full 
educational system — did about this time set up several such 
schools for philosophy and theology. However, the great body 
of the young men intending for the ministry did then, and for 
more than a century after, resort to the University of Glasgow 
for their higher education. Of this college Hutcheson became 
a student about 17 10 (he does not seem to have matriculated 
till 171 1). During his residence with his grandfather he be- 
came such a favorite with the old man, that when he died in 
171 1, it was found that he had altered a prior settlement of his 
family affairs, and, passing by the older grandson, had left all 
his landed property to the second. Francis, though a cautious, 
was a generous youth : he had all along taken pains, even by 
means of innocent artifices, to uphold his brother in the old 
man's esteem ; and now he refused to accept the bequest, while 
Hans, with equal liberality, declined to receive what had been 
destined for another ; and the friendly dispute had at last to be 
settled by a partition of the lands, which again became united 
when Hans, dying without issue, left his share to the son of 
Francis. 

Francis Hutcheson thus sprang, like Gershom Carmichael 
(and we shall afterwards see George Turnbull), from the old 

1 Sir James Mackintosh says in his "Dissertation : " "The place of Hutche- 
son's birth is not mentioned in any account known to me. Ireland may be truly 
said to be incuriosa suorutn." Had Sir James made inquiries in the likely quarter, 
he would have found the place of his birth and the leading incidents of his life 
mentioned in an article signed "M." in the "Belfast Magazine" (for August,, 
1S13), edited by Dr. Drennan, a man of superior literary ability, and son of the 
Rev. Thomas Drennan, one of Hutcheson's most intimate friends. 



Art. vii.] UNDER PROFESSOR SIM SON. 5 1 

orthodox Presbyterian Church and its educated pastors ; and 
both were early nurtured in the scholastic logic, from winch 
they received much benefit. But Hutch eson comes an age 
later than Carmichael, and falls more thoroughly under the new 
spirit which has gone abroad. 

At Glasgow the youth followed the usual course of study in 
the classical languages and philosophy, and enjoyed the privi- 
lege of sitting under the prelections of Carmichael. In after years, 
when called back to be a professor in the college, he gives in 
his Introductory Lecture a glimpse of the books and branches 
in which he felt most interest in his student life. After refer- 
ring to the pleasure which he experienced in seeing once more 
the buildings, gardens, fields, suburbs, and rivers' banks (more 
pleasant then than now), which had been so dear to him, he 
expresses the peculiar gratification which he felt in revisiting 
the place where he had drunk the first elements of the quest 
for truth ; where Homer and Virgil, where Xenophon, Aris- 
tophanes, and Terence, where the philosophy of Cicero and the 
discussions of the Fathers, had been opened to him ; and where 
he had first been taught to inquire into the nature and reasons 
{rationes) of virtue, the eternal relations of number and figures, 
and the character of God. Having taken the Master's degree 
in 1 71 2, he entered, the following year, on the study of theology 
under Professor John Simson. This professor was at that 
time, and, indeed, for the greater part of the period from 171 2 
to 1729, under prosecution before the ecclesiastical courts for 
teaching doctrines inconsistent with the Confession of Faith. 
It appears from the charges brought against him, and from 
his shuffling and vacillating explanations (he was often in a 
shattered state of health), that he took a favorable view of the 
state of the heathen ; that he was inclined to the doctrine of 
free-will ; he maintained that punishment for original sin alone 
was not just. ; he held that rational creatures must necessarily 
seek their chief good, — always under subserviency to the glory 
of God, who cannot impose a law contrary to his own nature 
and to theirs, and who cannot condemn any except those who 
seek their chief good in something else, and in a different way 
than God has prescribed : but the special charge against him 
was, that he denied that Jesus Christ is a necessarily existent 
being in the same sense as the Father is. The lengthened pro- 



52 FRANCIS HUTCHESON. [Art. vii. 

cess concluded with the General Assembly declaring, in 1729, 
that Mr. Simson was not fit to be intrusted with the training 
of students for the ministry. It does not appear that young 
Mr. Hutcheson ever threw himself into this agitation on the 
one side or other, but it doubtless left its impression on his 
mind ; and this, I rather think, was to lead him to adopt, if 
not the doctrine, at least some of the liberal sentiments of Sim- 
son ; to keep him from engaging in religious controversy ; and 
to throw him back for certainty on the fundamental truths of 
natural theology and the lofty morality of the New Testament. 
To the teaching of Simson the historians of the Church of 
Scotland are accustomed to trace the introduction of the " New 
Light " theology into the pulpits both of Scotland and Ulster. 
But there were other and deeper causes also at work, produc- 
ing simultaneously very much the same results all over the 
Protestant Continent of Europe, and in England both in the 
Church and among Non-conformists. It was a period of grow- 
ing liberality of opinion, according to the view of the rising 
literary men of the country. It was a time of doctrinal deteri- 
oration, followed rapidly by a declension of living piety, and in 
the age after of a high morality, according to the view of the 
great body of earnest Christians. In the preceding age, Milton, 
Newton, and Locke had abandoned the belief in the divinity of 
Christ, and the great Church of England divine of that age, 
Samuel Clarke, was defending the Arian creed, and setting 
aside the Reformation doctrine of grace. Francis Hutcheson, 
by this time a preacher, writes from Ireland to a friend in Scot- 
land, in 1 71 8, of the younger ministers in Ulster: "I find by 
the conversation I have had with some ministers and comrades, 
that there is a perfect Hoadley mania among our younger min- 
isters in the north ; and, what is really ridiculous, it does not 
serve them to be of his opinions, but their pulpits are ringing 
with them, as if their hearers were all absolute princes going to 
impose tests and confessions in their several territories, and not 
a set of people entirely excluded from the smallest hand in the 
government anywhere, and entirely incapable of bearing any 
other part in the prosecution but as sufferers. I have reason, 
however, to apprehend that the antipathy to confessions is upon 
other grounds than a new spirit of charity. Dr. Clarke's work 
(on the Trinity), I'm sufficiently informed, has made several 



Art. vii.] A TEACHER IN DUBLIN. 53 

unfixed in their old principles, if not entirely altered them." 
Hutcheson never utters any more certain sound than this on 
the religious controversies of his day. It is evident that his 
mind is all along more inclined towards ethical philosophy and 
natural theology. 

It is interesting to notice that, in 171 7, he wrote a letter to 
S. Clarke stating objections to his famous "Demonstration of 
the Being and Attributes of God," and that he received a reply, 
both of which are lost. We are reminded that, about four 
years before this, Joseph Butler, then a youth of twenty-one, at 
a dissenting academy, had written Clarke, taking exception to 
certain points in his " Demonstration," and had received answers 
to his letters. The objections of Hutcheson must have been 
more fundamental as to method than those of Butler. He was 
convinced that, as some subjects from their nature are capable 
of demonstration, so others admit only of probable proof, and 
he had great doubts of the validity of all metaphysical argu- 
ments in behalf of the existence of Deity. Dr. Leechman tells 
us : " This opinion of the various degrees of evidence adapted 
to various subjects first led Dr. Hutcheson to treat morals as a 
matter of fact, and not as founded on the abstract relation of 
things." 

During his student life he was tutor for a time to the Earl of 
Kilmarnock. Leaving college about 17 16, he was licensed to 
preach the gospel by the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. His 
preaching does not seem to have been acceptable to the people, 
who were alarmed at the New Light doctrine which was creep- 
ing in among them, and felt that the young preacher's dis- 
courses were scarcely in the spirit of the Scriptures, as they 
were not after the model of the ministers and divines whom 
they reverenced. 1 However, he received a call from a country 

1 " His father, laboring under a slight rheumatic affection, deputed him to 
preach in his place on a cold and rainy sabbath. About two hours after Francis 
had left Ballyrea, the rain abated and the sun shone forth, the day became serene 
and warm, and Mr. Hutcheson, feeling anxious to collect the opinions of his con- 
gregation on the merits of his favorite son, proceeded directly to the city. But 
how was he astonished and chagrined when he met almost the whole of his flock 
coming from the meeting-house, with strong marks of disappointment and disgust 
visible irf their countenance. One of the elders, a native of Scotland, addressed 
the surprised and mortified father thus : ' We a' feel muckle wae for your mis- 
hap, reverend sir ; but it canna be concealed. Your silly loon Frank has fashed 
a' the congregation wi' his idle cackle ; for he has been babbling this oor about a 



54 FRANCIS HUTCHESON. [Art. vii. 

congregation at Magherally, in his native county, but was easily 
persuaded to accept instead an invitation to open an academy 
in Dublin, to give instruction in the higher branches. About 
the time he settled there the Protestant Non-conformists, aided 
by the government, but after a keen opposition from the Irish 
bishops, had succeeded in obtaining a parliamentary repeal of 
the Acts which required all persons to resort to their parish 
church every Sunday, and imposed a fine of £100 upon the 
dissenting minister who officiated in any congregation. But 
the young teacher had to suffer two prosecutions in the arch- 
bishop's court for daring to teach youth without subscribing 
the canons and obtaining a license. These attacks upon him 
came to nothing, as they were discouraged by the Archbishop. 
Dr. King, author of the metaphysical work on the " Origin of 
Evil," who, though he had been a determined opponent of the 
relaxation allowed by law to dissenters, was unwilling to oppress 
so accomplished a man and well-disposed a citizen as Hutche- 
son. In Dublin he had laborious duties to discharge, which 
left him, he complained, little time for literature and mental 
culture ; but he seems to have met with congenial society. The 
Presbyterians and Independents were the representatives of the 
English Non-conformists, who had been a considerable body 
there when Henry Cromwell was vice-regent, and when Winter 
and Charnock preached to them in Christ's Church Cathedral ; 
and they had among them families of standing and influence. 
His literary accomplishments opened other circles to him. 
There seems to have been at that time a considerable taste for 
learning and philosophy in the metropolis of Ireland. From a 
very early date after its publication, the " Essay on the Human 

gude and benevolent God, and that the sauls o' the heathens themsels will gang 
to heeven, if they follow the light of their own consciences. Not a word does 
the daft boy ken, speer, nor say, about the gude auld comfortable doctrine of elec- 
tion, reprobation, original sin, and faith. Hoot, mon, awa' wi' sic a fellow ! ' " 
The only members who waited for the end of the sermon were Mr. Johnson of 
Knappa, Mr. M'Geough, and the clerk. (Stuart's "History of Armagh.") This 
story may be made somewhat more pointed in the telling, but is, we have no 
doubt, substantially correct. It will be remembered that Professor Simson held 
similar views in regard to the heathen ; and, in the Introduction to the Transla- 
tion of Antoninus by Hutcheson and Moor, the authors maintain : " 'Tis but a 
late doctrine in the Christian church that the grace of God and all divine influ- 
ences were confined to such as knew the Christian history, and were by profes- 
sion in the Christian church." 



Art. vii.] HIS FIRST PHILOSOPHIC WORKS. 55 

Understanding," had been most enthusiastically welcomed by 
Molyneux, who corresponded with Locke, and expressed his 
excessive admiration of him. Berkeley, the tutor of Molyneux's 
son, began in 1707 to give to the world his ingenious specula- 
tions on mathematical and philosophical subjects. It does not 
appear that Hutcheson was acquainted with Berkeley, who, we 
rather think, would not appreciate the views of Hutcheson: 
he has certainly condemned the opinions of Shaftesbury. But 
he enjoyed the friendship of a number of eminent men, includ- 
ing Viscount Molesworth and Dr. Synge afterwards Bishop of 
Elphin ; both of whom encouraged him to publish his first work, 
and assisted him in preparing it for the press. The former 
connects him historically with Shaftesbury, who had written 
letters to Molesworth, which were published in 1721. When 
in Dublin, Hutcheson and some others formed a club in which 
papers were read by the members on philosophic themes. It is 
an interesting circumstance, that in the next age some of the 
more important works of Gerard, Reid, Beattie, and Campbell 
sprang out of a similar society in Aberdeen. 

It was in 1725 that he published in London his first work, 
"An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Vir- 
tue." The treatise was published anonymously, as (so he tells 
us in the second edition) he had so little confidence of success 
that he was unwilling to own it. The subject, the thoughts, 
and the style were suited to the age ; and the work was favora- 
bly received from the first. Lord Granville (afterwards Lord 
Carteret), the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, sent his private sec- 
retary to inquire at the bookseller's for the author ; and when 
he could not learn his name he left a letter to be conveyed to 
him, in consequence of which Hutcheson became acquainted 
with his Excellency and was treated by him with distinguished 
marks of esteem. A second edition, corrected and enlarged, 
was called for in 1 726. 

This was the age of serial literary essays which had com- 
menced in England with the " Tatler " and " Spectator." There 
was such a periodical set up in the metropolis of Ireland called 
the " Dublin Journal " conducted by Hibernicus (Dr. Arbucle), 
and to this paper Hutcheson sent two letters, of date June 5th 
and June 12th, 1725, on " Laughter," in opposition to the views 
of Hobbes, who attributed men's actions to selfish motives, and 



56 FRANCIS HUTCHESON. [Art. vii. 

represented laughter as nothing else but sudden glory arising 
from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, 
by comparison with the infirmity of others or our own formerly. 
He characterizes Hobbes as " having fallen into a way of speak- 
ing which was much more intelligible than that of the School- 
men," and " so becoming agreeable to many wits of his age ; " 
and as "assuming positive, solemn airs, which he uses most 
when he is going to assert some solemn absurdity or some ill- 
natured nonsense." He finds it difficult to treat the subject of 
laughter " gravely," but gives his theory of the cause of laugh- 
ter, which is " the bringing together of images which have 
contrary additional ideas, as well as some resemblance in the 
principal idea ; this contrast between ideas of grandeur, dignity, 
sanctity, perfection, and ideas of meanness, baseness, profanity, 
seems to be the very spirit of burlesque, and the greater part 
of our raillery and jest are founded on it." Some such view 
as this has ever since been given of wit. Samuel Johnson 
describes it as a sort of concordia discors or concors discordia. 
Hutcheson ventures to specify the use of laughter : " Our pas- 
sions are apt to lead us into foolish apprehensions of objects 
both in the way of admiration and honor, and ridicule comes 
in to temper our minds." This moderate view falls consid- 
erably short of that given by Shaftesbury, who represents ridi- 
cule as a test of truth. 

Mandeville, in " The Fable of the Bees," had advanced some 
curious and doubtful speculations as to private vices being pub- 
lic benefits ; showing that the power and grandeur of any nation 
depend much upon the number of people and their industry, 
which cannot be procured unless there be consumption of man- 
ufactures ; and that the intemperance, luxury, and pride of men 
consume manufactures, and promote industry. The author has 
here caught hold of a positive and important truth, the explana- 
tion of which carries us into some of the deepest mysteries of 
Providence, in which we see good springing out of vice, and 
God ruling this world in spite of its wickedness, and by means 
of its wickedness, but without identifying himself with it. But 
Mandeville was not able to solve the profound problem, and in 
dealing with it he uses expressions which look as if he intended 
to justify, or at least to palliate vice. Hutcheson hastens to 
save morality, and writes letters on the subject to Hibernicus, 



Art. vii.] LETTERS OF BURNET. S7 

and easily shows that virtue tends to private and public happi- 
ness, and vice to private and public misery ; and that there 
" would be an equal consumption of manufactures without these 
vices and the evils which flow from them." 

Hutcheson had now tasted the draught of authorship, and 
must drink on. In the "London Journal" for 1728, there ap- 
peared some Letters signed " Philaretus," containing objections 
to the doctrine of the " Inquiry into the Ideas of Beauty and 
Virtue," which is represented as not giving a sufficiently deep 
view of virtue as founded on the nature of things and perceived 
by reason. Hutcheson replies in the same journal. In that 
same year he published his second great work, being " An Essay 
on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, 
with illustrations of the Moral Sense." In the Preface he says, 
"Some Letters in the ' London Journal,' in 1728, subscribed 
'Philaretus,' gave occasion to the Fourth Treatise (on the 
Moral Sense) ; the answer given to them in these weekly papers 
bore too visible marks of the hurry in which they were wrote, 
and therefore the author declined to continue the debate that 
way, choosing to send a private letter to Philaretus to desire a 
more private correspondence on the subject of our debate. He 
was soon after informed that his death disappointed the author's 
great expectations from so ingenious a correspondent." Phila- 
retus turned out to be Gilbert Burnet (second son, I believe, 
of the bishop), and the correspondence was published in 1735, 
with a postscript written by Burnet shortly before his death. 
Burnet examines Hutcheson from the stand-point of Clarke, 
and fixes on some of the weak points of the new theory. 

At this time there was a keen controversy in Ulster as to 
whether the Presbyterian Church should require an implicit 
subscription to the Westminster Confession of Faith, and this 
issued in those who refused to subscribe forming themselves 
into a separate body called the Antrim Presbytery, the mem- 
bers of which published a " Narrative of the Proceedings of the 
Seven Synods," which led to their separation. The work of 
replying to this document was committed to Mr. Hutcheson, of 
Armagh, whose paper, however, was not published till after his 
decease, which took place in February, 1729. The old man had 
anxieties about his son, lest he should be tempted by the flat- 
tering attentions paid him in Dublin to conform to the Estab- 



58 FRANCIS HUTCHESON. [Art. vn. 

lished Church, and wrote a letter expressing his fears. We 
have the reply of the son, of date Aug. 4, 1726. In this he 
avows that he did not regard the " government or externals of 
worship so determined in the gospel as to oblige men to one 
particular way in either : " that he looks upon the established 
form as an "inconvenient one;" that he reckons the dissenters' 
cause "in most disputed points the better;" that he believes 
the original of both civil and ecclesiastical power is from God ; 
he denounces those religious penal laws which " no magistrate 
can have a right to make ; " but he would not blame any man 
of his own principles who did conform, if the " ends proposed 
were such as would over-balance the damage which the more 
just cause would sustain by his leaving, particularly if he had 
any prospect of an unjust establishment being altered," of which, 
he confesses, he does not see the least probability. He says, 
that both Lord Cathcart and the Bishop of Elphin had pro- 
fessed their desire to have him brought over " to the Church, 
to a good living ;" that he kept his mind "very much to him- 
self in these matters, and resolved to do ;" but that he had no 
intention whatever to depart from his present position, and 
that he would feel it his duty continually to promote the cause 
of dissenters. I rather think that this frank but expediency 
letter would not altogether satisfy the good old father, who had 
stood firm on principle in trying times. I have referred to 
these transactions, because they exhibit the struggles which 
were passing in many a bosom in those times of transition from 
one state of things to another. Hutcheson never conformed, 
as his contemporary Butler did, to the Church. His Presby- 
terian friends were soon relieved from all anxieties in this direc- 
tion by his being appointed, after he had been seven or eight 
years in Dublin, to an office altogether congenial to his tastes, 
in Glasgow University, where, however, he exercised a religious 
influence which his father, provided he had been spared to 
witness it, would have viewed with apprehension and disap- 
proval. 

He was chosen to succeed Carmichael, Dec. 19, 1729, by a 
majority of the Faculty, over Mr. Warner, favored at first by 
the principal, and over Mr. Frederick Carmichael, son of Ger- 
shom, supported by five of the professors. His appointment 
could be justified on the ground of merit ; but he owed it mainly 



Art. vii.] INAUGURAL DISCOURSE. 59 

to family connections, who gained Lord Isla, the great govern- 
ment patron of the day, before whom the principal had to give 
way. 1 In October, 1730, twenty English students have come 
to the college, expecting Mr. Hutcheson — whose " Inquiry " and 
work on the " Passions " were already well known — to " teach 
morality ; " Professor Loudon, however, insisted that he had a 
right to take the chair of Moral Philosophy, whereupon the 
English students gave in a paper declaring that, if Mr. Hutche- 
son, who had not yet come over from Ireland, did not teach 
them morality, they would set off to Edinburgh, and Mr. Lou- 
don had to yield. On November 30, he was publicly admitted, 
and delivered, in a low tone and hurried manner, as if awed and 
bashful, an inaugural discourse, " De Naturali Hominum Socia- 
litate," in which he expounds, in a clear and pleasant manner, 
and in good Latin, his favorite doctrine as to man having in his 
nature disinterested affections. He maintains, in opposition to 
the "very celebrated" Locke, that man has something natural, 
but admits that it requires time and circumstances to bring it 
forth ; and in opposition to Hobbes and Puffendorff, that man 
can be swayed by other motives than self-love. He represents 
the conscience as the to tjysponxov to which all our nature ought 
to be subjected, and to which it had been subjected in our 
entire state ; but admits that our nature is fallen, weakened, 
and corrupted, in many ways. Hutcheson lectured five days 
a week on his proper course, which embraced Natural Religion, 
Morals, Jurisprudence, and Government ; and at another hour 
he read three days of the week, with his students, some of the 
finest writers of antiquity, Greek and Latin, on the subject of 
morals ; interpreting both the language and sentiment. This 
practice of combining reading with lectures was followed by 
his successors in the moral chair in Glasgow, and is vastly 
superior to the plan of the Edinburgh professors of a later date, 
who instructed their pupils only by reading lectures. His pre- 
lections were at first, after the manner of the times, in Latin ; 
but he had the courage to break off from the ancient custom, 
and to speak in the English tongue, no doubt to the great joy 
and benefit of the students, who might lose somewhat in not 
being familiarized with the ancient learned language ; but would 
gain vastly more in being brought into close sympathy with the 

1 Wodrow's " Analecta." 



60 FRANCIS HUTCHESON. [Art. vii. 

speaker, in listening from day to day to elegant English, and in 
the mastery which they would thereby acquire over their own 
tongue. Dr. Carlyle has left us a picture of the lecturer : " I 
attended Hutcheson's class this year (1743-44) with great satis- 
faction and improvement. He was a good-looking man, of 
engaging countenance. He delivered his lectures without 
notes, walking backwards and forwards in the area of his room. 
As his elocution was good, and his voice and manner pleasing, 
he raised the attention of his hearers at all times ; and when 
the subject led him to explain and enforce the moral virtues, 
he displayed a fervent and persuasive eloquence which was 
irresistible." A like account is given of him by his professed 
biographer Leechman : " A stature above middle size, a gesture 
and manner negligent and easy, but decent and manly, gave a 
dignity to his appearance. His complexion was fair and san- 
guine, and his features regular. His countenance and look 
bespoke sense, spirit, kindness and joy of heart." It may be 
added that this is the very impression left as we gaze on his 
portrait, with wig and gown, with florid face, and easy but dig- 
nified air, in the common hall of Glasgow College. Leechman 
represents him as dwelling in his lectures in a more diffuse 
manner on such moral considerations as are suited to touch 
the heart, and excite a relish for what is truthful and noble ; 
and by his vivacity of thought, and sensibility of temper, com- 
manding the attention of his students, and leaving strong 
impressions on their minds. 

In the college he had an eminent colleague in Mr. Robert 
Simson (nephew of the theological professor), and a congenial 
one in Mr. Alexander Dunlop, the professor of Greek. Mr. 
Simson was an eccentric man, who spent his time between 
severe geometrical studies in the morning, and social meetings 
in the tavern at which he lived, or in his club, in the evening. 
Hutcheson and Dunlop — who was a man of strong sense and 
capacity for business — got the credit of managing all the 
affairs of the university, and both exerted themselves to main- 
tain the discipline of the college and foster its literary tastes. 
In particular, Hutcheson had great success in reviving the 
study of ancient literature, particularly the Greek, which had 
been much neglected in the university before his time. At a 
later date, he had associates of a kindred spirit in the elegant 



Art. vii.] HIS PUPILS. 6 1 

and grave Dr. Leechman, professor of theology (afterwards 
principal) ; in the lively and learned Dr. Moor, first the libra- 
rian of the college, and in 1746 made professor of Greek ; and 
in the two eminent printers, Robert and Andrew Foulis, who 
published a multitude of learned works, including many of 
Hutcheson's. With such a spirit reigning in the college, and 
a great thirst for education on the part of the Scottish youth, 
fostered by the parish and burgh schools, the class-rooms were 
filled with students. Carlyle, who had just come in 1743 to 
Glasgow, after having been at Edinburgh College, describes 
the spirit that reigned among the youths : " Although at the 
time there appeared to be a marked superiority in the best 
scholars and most diligent students of Edinburgh, yet in Glas- 
gow learning seemed to be an object of more importance, and 
the habit of application was much more general," — a descrip- 
tion which applies equally to Glasgow in after years. He men- 
tions that among the students there were sundry young 
gentlemen from Ireland, with their tutors ; and he names, 
among young men of station attending, Walter Lord Blantyre, 

Sir Kennedy and his brother David, afterwards Lord 

Cassilis, Walter Scott of Harden, James Murray of Broughton, 
and Dunbar Hamilton, afterwards Earl of Selkirk. The Scotch 
colleges were quite competent at that time to educate the 
nobility of the country, who had not yet fallen into the way of 
going to the great English schools and colleges, there to lose 
their national predilections and become separated, as they did 
in succeeding ages, from the sympathies, social, political, and 
religious, of the middle classes and common people of Scot- 
land, to the great injury of the church and the nation gener- 
ally. 

Hutcheson exercised a special influence in drawing students, 
Scottish, Irish Presbyterian, and English Non-conformist, to 
the college. His own class was so large that he had to employ 
an assistant. The Calvinistic creed of the south-west of Scot- 
land, the theological preaching of the old-school ministers, and 
the training of the young in the Shorter Catechism, all inclined 
the students to mental philosophy ; and in Hutcheson they had 
much to attract, and little to offend. When he set before them 
wide fields of knowledge ; when, in his lectures on natural the- 
ology, he pointed out evidences of the wisest contrivance and 



62 FRANCIS HUTCHESON. [Art. vii. 

most beneficent intention ; when he led them from the external 
world into the still greater wonders of the internal, and traced 
the parts of man's moral constitution, and described the virtues 
in their loveliest form, and enlarged on the elevated enjoyments 
furnished by them ; when he quoted, with glowing zest, the 
noblest passages of Greek and Roman literature ; when he 
inculcated, with immense enthusiasm, the importance of civil 
and religious liberty, — the students felt as if a new world were 
thrown open to them, and a new life kindled within them. Fol- 
lowing the custom of his predecessor, he lectured on the sab- 
bath evenings on the truth and excellence of Christianity, and 
the students of all the classes eagerly rushed to his prelections. 
The conversation of the youths in their social walks and visits 
often turned on the literary and philosophic themes which he 
discussed, and some of them chose to attend his lectures for 
four or five successive years. Among his pupils were Mr. 
Millar, afterwards President of the Court of Session ; Archibald 
Maclaine, who in future years translated Mosheim's " Ecclesias- 
tical History ; " Matthew Stewart, famous for his Mathematical 
Tracts, and father of Dugald Stewart ; and a youth, specially 
appreciated by Hutcheson, with a vast capacity for learning of 
every kind, and destined in future years to be so famous in 
Hutcheson's own department, — Adam Smith, author of " The 
Theory of Moral Sentiments," and of " The Wealth of Nations." 
All of these ever spoke of Hutcheson in terms of high admira- 
tion and gratitude. 

Defoe describes the city of Glasgow, with its four principal 
streets meeting in a cruciform manner at a point, as being, in 
1726, one of the cleanliest, most beautiful, and best built cities 
in Great Britain. On the street that ran toward the north 
stood the college, completed in 1656, with quadrangles, arcade, 
and spire, built after the style of Louis XIII. and Louis XIV. 
The population, when Hutcheson was a professor, might be 
upwards of twenty thousand. At the summit of the social 
scale were the foreign merchants engaged in the American 
trade, in which they carried out linen and brought back tobacco ; 
"the tobacco merchants, with their scarlet cloaks and gold- 
headed canes, and cocked hats, perched on powdered hair or 
wig, with dangling clubtie or pigtail." Next to them, but at a 
considerable distance, were the ordinary shopkeepers ; and far- 



Art. vii.] HIS COLLEGE LIFE. 63 

ther down, the tradesmen and servants ; while at the base were 
the Highlandmen, with their tartan jacket and kilts, driven 
from their native hills by starvation, and ready to perform the 
most servile work. All classes made a solemn religious pro- 
fession ; but Wodrow mourns over degenerate customs which 
wealth and luxury were introducing. The better citizens dined 
early in their own homes, without show ; and many of them 
spent their evenings in social meetings at taverns, — a practice 
which gendered those drinking customs which, beginning with 
the upper classes about this time, went down to the peasant 
class in the days of Burns, and by the end of the century in- 
fected the whole of Scottish society, which has not yet recov- 
ered from the evil influence. But Hutcheson does not seem to 
have been much mixed up with the citizen life of Glasgow ; we 
do not hear of his spending his evenings in the tavern, or being 
a member of any of the social clubs which began to spring up 
in Glasgow at this time. He had experience of the evil effects 
of the new habits (which were coming in with the new theol- 
ogy), in the lives of some of the Irish students who were com- 
mitted to his care, and over whom he watched with the most 
friendly interest. " The wretched turn their minds take is to 
the silly manliness of taverns." He satisfies himself with keep- 
ing personally free from the evil. He presses his friend Tom 
Drennan, from Belfast, to pay him a visit for a month or six 
weeks, and promises : " Robert Simson, with you and Charles 
Moor, would be wondrous happy till three in the morning ; I 
would be with you from five to ten." 

His sphere was within the walls of the college ; whence, how- 
ever, his influence spread over the educated mind of the south-' 
west of Scotland and of Ulster, and over not a few of the 
Non-conformists in England. Carlyle tells us that he was 
believed by the students to be a Socinian. There is no evi- 
dence of this, nor of his expressing any positive opinion on any 
doctrinal subject. Even in his Sabbath evening lectures he kept 
to Grotius " De Veritate Christianas Religionis," and avoided, 
Leechman tells us, " the party tenets or scholastic system of 
modern ages." He seems to have maintained a friendly com- 
munication with the non-subscribing Presbyterian ministers in 
Ireland, some of whom (such as Abernethy and Leland, and 
Bruce and Boyce) were as accomplished men as any theolo- 



64 FRANCIS HUTCHESON. [Art. vii. 

gians of their age, and of whom it may be said to their credit, 
that they suffered in their temporal interests rather than sub- 
scribe articles which they did not believe. In particular, 
Hutcheson carried on a very genial correspondence with the 
Rev. Thomas Drennan, a non- subscribing minister at Belfast. 1 
The ministers of this communion, more especially as they were 
often abandoned by the people when their views became known, 
were at times in very poor circumstances. On hearing this, 
Hutcheson writes to his friend (May 31, 1742): "I am con- 
cerned that in my prosperous circumstances I did not think of 
it sooner. If you have any little contributions made towards 
such as are more distressed than the rest, you may mark me as 
a subscriber for £ 5 per annum, and take the above ten pounds 
as my payment for two years past. ... I think it altogether 
proper you should not mention my name to your brethren, but 
conceal it. I am already called New Light here. I don't 
value it for myself, but I see it hurts some ministers who are 
most intimate with me. I have been these ten days in great 
hurry and perplexity, as I have for that time foreseen the 
death of our professor, who died last Wednesday, and some 
of my colleagues join me in laboring for Mr. Leechman to 
succeed. We are not yet certain of the event, but have good 
hopes. If he succeed, it will put a new face upon theology in 
Scotland." 

This was no doubt one of the ends for which Hutcheson 
lived and labored, " to put a new face upon theology in Scot/and." 2 
Discouraging all doctrinal exposition, and all rousing appeals 
to the conscience, he would have the preachers recommend the 
Christian religion as embracing a pure morality, and holding 
out the hope of a blessed immortality ; but meanwhile providing 
no pardon to the poor sinner anxious about the past, nor gra- 
cious aid to help him in his struggles to deliver himself from 
sin in the future. Never avowing any doctrinal belief, his stu- 

1 The valuable letters of Hutcheson have been kindly placed at the disposal 
of the author of this work by Dr. Drennan, grandson of the Rev. Thomas Dren- 
nan, and have been used in this Memoir. 

2 There is evidently an analogous (not identical) movement going on in Scot- 
land at this present time. There is an understood combination of persons in and 
beyond the universities, laboring in reviews, in books, and from the pulpits "to 
put a new face upon theology in Scotland," just as Hutcheson and Leechman 
did. 



Art. vii.] INFLUENCE ON SCOTTISH THEOLOGY. G$ 

dents looked upon him as a Socinian, and so his influence went 
in that direction. The crop that sprang up may be taken as 
represented by such men as Carlyle, elegant and accommodating, 
but dreadfully rankled by a Calvinistic creed which they had to 
swear, and by the opposition of the people, who could not be 
made to feel that the New Light was suited to them, or to 
believe that it had any title to be called a religion. But all 
this was in the future, and was not the piecise result expected 
by Hutcheson. Meanwhile he rejoices in Leechman, and de- 
scribes him as one "who sees all I do." It seems that the 
Scotch divine received a call from a non-subscribing congrega- 
tion in Belfast, and Hutcheson is rather inclined that he should 
go ; he is so anxious to have him out of " that obscure place 
where he was so much lost," and where he was " preaching to a 
pack of horse-copers and smugglers of the rudest sort," who, 
we venture to say, would not profit much by that calm, abstract, 
elegant style which so pleased the professor of moral philoso- 
phy. Hutcheson uses every means to secure Leechman's 
appointment to the chair of theology in Glasgow, and brings 
influence of a very unscrupulous character (as I reckon it) to 
carry his point. He writes Mr. Mure of Caldwell (Nov. 23, 
1743) that he wants a letter from the Duke of Montrose, the 
Chancellor of the University, in behalf of Leechman to Morth- 
land, professor of Oriental languages, to be shown to others, 
and he malignantly mentions that Professor Anderson, the chief 
opponent of Leechman, " made himself ridiculous to all men of 
sense by dangling after Whitefield and M'Cullogh " (" Caldwell 
Papers ") ; and he wants this to be specially known to Tweeddale, 
who was Secretary of State for Scotland, and to Andrew Mitch- 
ell, his private secretary. It seems that the advocates of liber- 
ality could not tolerate that a man should be favorable to a 
revival of religion. It was by such means that " a new face was 
to be put upon the theology of Scotland." He writes to his 
Belfast friend (Feb. 20, 1743-44) : " I could tell you a good deal 
of news upon the unexpected election of a professor of divinity, 
and the furious indignation of our zealots." He had written 
previously (March 5, 1738-39): "I hope Jack Smith has sent 
down to your town a ' Serious Address to the Kirk of Scotland,' 
lately published in London ; it has run like lightning here, and 
is producing some effect ; the author is unknown ; 'tis wrote 

5 



66 FRANCIS HUTCHESON. [Art. vii. 

with anger and contempt of the Kirk and Confession, but it 
has a set of objections against the Confession which I imagine 
few will have the brow to answer." The moderate party in the 
Church of Scotland is being crystallized by coldness out of the 
floating elements ; and already there is a felt polar antipathy 
between them and those whom they choose to call " zealots." 
Hutcheson writes (April 16, 1746), "I would as soon speak to 
the Roman conclave as our presbytery." 

The professor of theology introduced by him to the college, 
had signed the Confession of Faith, and professed his willing- 
ness to sign it at any time. He accomplished the end of 
Hutcheson. The subjects represented by him as suitable to 
be dwelt on by the preacher from the pulpit, were the perfec- 
tions of God ; the excellence of virtue, and the perfection of the 
divine law ; the truth of the Christian religion, and the impor- 
tant purposes for which Jesus came into the world ; the great 
doctrines he taught ; the interesting scenes of providence he 
has displayed to men ; the dignity and immortality of the soul, 
and the inconceivable happiness of the heavenly state. In the 
social circle he was grave and silent, but is represented by Car- 
lyle as having a lively wife, who entertained the students that 
came to his house in the evening, and was anxious to hear 
about the new plays and novels which were coming into Scot- 
land. He set out a body of young preachers, who unfortunately 
lost the common people, and the pious of all ranks, without 
gaining the worldly and unbelieving. He published a sermon 
in which he thought to recommend prayer as fitted to have an 
influence on the mind of the person praying, and submitted a 
copy to Hume, who told him plainly that the person praying 
must believe that his prayers have an influence on God and 
bring an answer. 

It should be allowed that Hutcheson was most anxious to 
impart a taste for learning and refinement to the ministers of 
the Church of Scotland. He was deeply impressed with the 
evils which were springing from the law of patronage being 
now put in operation with a high hand. In 1735, he published 
" Considerations on Patronage, addressed to the Gentlemen of 
Scotland." In this pamphlet he predicts that, " instead of 
studying sobriety of manners, piety, diligence, or literature, one 
or other of which qualities are now necessary to recommend 



Art. vil] HIS LATTER DAYS. 67 

the candidates to the favor of heritors, elders or presbytery, the 
candidate's sole study will be to stand right in politics, to make 
his zeal for the ministry of state conspicuous ; or by all servile 
compliance with the humor of some great lord who has many 
churches in his gift, whether that humor be virtuous or vicious, 
to secure a presentation." He fears the mischiefs of patronage 
were but beginning to appear, and that gentlemen's sons will no 
longer devote themselves to the ministerial office, which will be 
sought by lads of mean parentage and circumstances. It is 
quite certain that, owing to the law of patronage, combined 
with the smallness of the livings, estimated by Hutcheson as 
at that time about £80 a year, and the influence of London 
court life, the upper classes (from which so many ministers had 
sprung in the previous century) ceased from this time to encour- 
age their sons to enter the sacred office. 

The recorded incidents of his person and family life are not 
numerous. He seems to have been engrossed in lecturing to 
his students, in managing college matters, and in preparing 
text-books. He published a " Compend of Logic," a " Synopsis 
of Metaphysics," and " Institutes of Philosophy," all in clear 
and graceful Latin (referred to with commendation by Dr. Parr 
in his " Spital Sermon "). He joined Dr. Moor in publishing a 
translation of the " Meditations " of Antoninus, with a life of 
Antoninus, an introduction and notes in English, the last show- 
ing a considerable acquaintance with the Stoic philosophy. 

When in Dublin, he had married Mary Wilson, daughter of 
Francis Wilson, a gentleman of property, and belonging to a 
Presbyterian family in Longford. In a letter to a friend, Feb. 
12, 1740, he speaks of himself as "having been married now 
fifteen years and having only one boy surviving, of seven chil- 
dren borne to me by a very agreeable woman. I bless God for 
the one he has spared to me, and that he has no bad genius. If 
he proves a wise and good man, I am very well in this world. 
Since my settlement in this college I have had an agreeable 
and I hope not an useless life, pretty much hurried with study 
and business, but such as is not unpleasant. I hope I am con- 
tributing to promote the more moderate and charitable senti- 
ments in religious matters in this country, where yet there 
remains too much warmth, and commonly about matters of no 
great consequence to real religion. We must make allowance 



68 FRANCIS HUTCHESON. [Art. vii. 

for the power of education in all places, and have indulgence to 
the weakness of our brethren." 1 

So early as June, 1741, he writes to his Belfast friend: "In 
short, Tom, I find old age, not in gray hairs and other trifles, 
but in an incapacity of mind for such close thinking and com- 
position as I once had, and have pretty much dropped the 
thoughts of some great designs I had once sketched out." On 
April 3, 1745, he was nominated to the chair of moral philoso- 
phy in Edinburgh by the Town Council, but declined the 
honor, in consequence of not feeling strong enough to engage 
in new labors. He writes, April 16, 1746: "I am in a great 
deal of private distresses about Jo. Wilson and his sister, the 
latter in the utmost danger, the other scarce recovered from 
death ; my wife, too, very tender ; but, by a set of most intri- 
cate business, upon which the soul of this college depends, and 
all may be ruined by the want of one vote, I cannot leave this 
till after 26th June, and we go to Dublin first." He had been 
for some months in an uncertain state of health : he went to 
Dublin about the time mentioned in the letter quoted ; and 
there, after a few days' fever, he was cut off, Aug. 8, 1746. 
His remains were buried in the old graveyard of Knockmark, 
East Meath, among his wife's kindred, the Wilsons and Stan- 
hopes. He left one son, who became a physician, and rose 
to be professor of chemistry in Dublin College. That son 
published, in 1754, his "System of Moral Philosophy," to 
which is prefixed an account of the father's life by Dr. Leech- 
man. 

Hutcheson has nowhere explained very fully or formally the 
method on which he proceeds. But he everywhere appeals to 
facts ; he brings all theories to the test of the actual operations 
of the human mind as disclosed to consciousness (a word fre- 
quently employed by him) ; he sets no value on speculations 
built up in any other way ; and he everywhere speaks doubt- 
fully or disparagingly of the logical distinctions and verbal 
subtleties of the schoolmen, and of the rational deductions of 
Descartes and Samuel Clarke. Proceeding on the method of 
observation, he discovers certain cognitive powers, which he 

1 MS. letter to Rev. T. Steward, minister at St. Edmundsbury, in possession 
of Mr. Reid in Londonderry. 



Art. vii.] HIS ACCOUNT OF THE SENSES. 69 

calls, perhaps unhappily, senses, which have a place in our very 
nature and constitution, and operate independent of any notice 
we may take of them. These features show that he belongs to 
the Scottish school, of which he is entitled to be regarded as 
the founder, inasmuch as no philosopher connected with North 
Britain had previously combined these characters, and as he in 
fact gave the modern stimulus to philosophic speculation in 
Scotland. 

He does not dwell at great length, nor very minutely, on the 
intellectual powers. He says that "late inquiries have been 
very much employed about our understanding, and the several 
methods of obtaining truth ; " and so he would rather investi- 
gate " the various pleasures which human nature is capable of 
receiving," and our various internal senses, perceptions, and 
affections, specially the sense of beauty and the moral sense. 
Still he intimates very clearly what views he takes of man's 
intellectual nature. And first, as to the senses, he says, " It is 
not easy to divide distinctly our several sensations into classes. 
The division of our external senses into the five common 
classes seems very imperfect. Some sensations received with- 
out any previous idea, can either be reduced to none of them, 
such as the sensations of hunger, thirst, weariness, sickness ; 
or, if we reduce them to the sense of feeling, they are percep- 
tions as different from the other ideas of touch, such as cold, 
heat, hardness, softness, as the ideas of taste or smell. 
Others have hinted at an external sense different from all of 
these. The following general account may possibly be useful : 

(1) That certain motions raised in our bodies are by a gen- 
eral law constituted the occasion of perceptions in the mind. 

(2) These perceptions never come alone, but have some other 
perceptions joined with them. Thus every sensation is accom- 
panied with the idea of duration, and yet duration is not a 
sensible idea, since it also accompanies ideas of internal con- 
sciousness or reflection ; so the idea of number may accompany 
any sensible ideas, and yet may also accompany any other ideas 
as well as external senses. Brutes, when several objects are 
before them, have probably all the proper ideas of sight which 
we have without the idea of number. (3) Some ideas are 
found accompanying the most different sensations, which yet 
are not to be perceived separately from some sensible quality, 



70 FRANCIS HUTCHESON. [Art. vii. 

such as extension, figure, motion, and rest, which accompany 
the ideas of sight or colors, and yet may be perceived without 
them, as in the ideas of touch, at least if we move our organs 
along the parts of the body touched. Extension, figure, 
motion, or rest, seem therefore to be more properly called 
ideas accompanying the sensations of sight and touch than 
the sensations of either of these senses, since they can be 
received sometimes without the ideas of color, and sometimes 
without those of touching, though never without the one or 
other. The perceptions which are purely sensible, received 
each by its proper sense, are tastes, smells, colors, sound, 
cold, heat, &c. The universal concomitant ideas which may 
attend any idea whatsoever are duration and number. The 
ideas which accompany the most different sensations are exten- 
sion, figure, motion, rest. These all arise without any pre- 
vious ideas assembled or compared ; the concomitant ideas are 
reputed images of something external. From all these we may 
justly distinguish those pleasures perceived upon the previous 
reception and comparison of various sensible perceptions with 
their concomitant ideas, or intellectual ideas, when we find 
uniformity or resemblance among them. These are meant by 
the perceptions of the internal sense." (" Nature and Con- 
duct of the Passions," Sect. I.) 

This note comprises the result and the sum of much reading 
and much reflection. The principal thoughts, more especially 
as to the separation of the ideas of number and duration, and 
of extension, figure, motion, and rest from our common sensa- 
tions, are taken, directly or indirectly, from Aristotle's " Psyche," 
B. II. c. vi. (which is not referred to, however), where there is 
a distinction drawn between common and proper percepts. 
But he seems to take a step beyond Aristotle when he tells us 
here, and still more expressly in his " Logic," that number and 
duration can be perceived both by the external and internal 
sense. It has been felt by all profound thinkers, that in order 
to account for the phenomena, and to save the senses from 
deceiving us, there must be distinctions of some sort drawn 
between different kinds of sensations or perceptions. Adopt- 
ing the distinction of Aristotle, we find him in his " Logic " iden- 
tifying it with that of Locke, between the primary and secondary 
qualities of bodies. It may be doubted whether we can so 



Art. vii.] HIS THEORY OF IDEAS. ?l 

absolutely divide, as Aristotle and Hutcheson did, the accom- 
panying ideas from the sensations or perceptions. The sensa- 
tions and ideas are in every case wrapped up in one concrete 
cognitive act, while, however, they may come up in a different 
concretion in our next experience, and may be separated into 
elements by an analytic process.- I rather think, too, that 
the perception of extension (as has been shown by Hamilton) 
is involved in all our sense-perceptions, for we seem to know 
our organism as in space and localized by every one of the 
senses. The language about the motions of bodies constituting 
the occasion of the perceptions in the mind, proceeds upon the 
inadequate distinction between efficient and occasional cause, 
drawn by the disciples of Descartes, — a distinction adopted by 
Reid as well- as Hutcheson. I suspect that it still remains 
true, that the common division of our external senses is very 
imperfect, and that it is not easy to arrange our sensations into 
classes. 

In regard to the question started in the next age by Reid, 
as to whether we perceive by the senses the external object, or 
an idea of it, it is certain that he accepts the view and the lan- 
guage of the great body of philosophers prior to his time, and 
speaks of our perceiving by ideas "as images of something 
external." 

Formal logic has been taught, I believe, in Glasgow Uni- 
versity from its establishment in 145 1 to this present time. 
Hutcheson has a " Logical Compendium " which was used as a 
text-book in Glasgow and elsewhere. In this treatise, after a 
meagre dissertation on the rise of philosophy, he defines logic 
as " the art of guiding the mind in the knowledge of things ; " 
adding, that it may also be considered a science, and that others 
define it " the art of discovering and declaring truth." These 
definitions will be regarded as too loose and vague by the rigid 
logicians of our time. In treating of the concept, notion, or 
idea, he represents ideas as being divided into sensations, imag- 
inations, and pure intellections, — a theory adopted by Gas- 
sendi, and favorably received by not a few for an age or two 
after the time of Descartes and Gassendi, as seeming to recon- 
cile these two eminent men. Hutcheson had previously repre- 
sented all sensation as external and internal, and declared, with 
Locke, that all our ideas arise either from the external sense or 



72 FRANCIS HUTCHESON. [Art. vii. 

from reflection. The intellections he defines as " any ideas not 
reached or comprehended by any bodily sense ; " they are 
chiefly " suggested by the internal sense, and include our 
actions, passions, judgments, doubts, and the like, and also 
abstract ideas." There is an incongruous mixture here of the 
Lockian with an older theory. The ideas derived from reflec- 
tion, which are all singular and concrete, should not be put in 
the same class with those abstract and general ideas which are 
formed by the intellect from the materials got from sensation 
and reflection, and, we may add, from those furnished by the 
faculties of the mind in their exercise, such as those we have 
of the beautiful and the good. This confusion long lingered in 
the Scottish psychology, from which it has scarcely yet been 
expelled. 

Hutcheson represents complex (concrete would be the better 
phrase) ideas as having comprehension, and universal ideas as 
having extension ; and announces the rule that extension and 
comprehension stand to each other in a reverse order. He 
distinguishes between a logical whole, which is a universal in 
respect of its species, which are spread out in division ; and a 
metaphysical whole, which is the comprehension of a complex 
idea, and is declared by definition. He distinguishes between 
noetic and dianoetic judgment, in the former of which the two 
ideas are compared immediately (proxime), and in the latter by 
means of a third. The subject, predicate, and copula are said 
to be in the proposition either expressed or suppressed and 
involved. He does give the dictum of Aristotle as the regulat- 
ing principle of reasoning, but derives all the force of syllogism 
from these three axioms, in which, we think, there is a very 
unsatisfactory vagueness in the phrase agre^: "(i) Things 
which agree in one third agree with one another ; (2) Things 
of which the one agrees and the other does not agree with one 
and the same third do not agree with one another ; (3) Things 
which agree in no third do not agree with each other ; (4) 
Things which disagree in no third do not disagree among them- 
selves. Hence are deduced the general rules of syllogisms." 
This " Compend " continued to be printed and used down to at 
least the close of the third quarter of the eighteenth century. 
One is inclined to think that these phrases and distinctions 
must have been introduced to the notice, and inscribed on the 



Art. vii.] HIS METAPHYSICAL SYSTEM. 73 

memory, of William Hamilton during his collegiate life at Glas- 
gow, and that they may have helped as they recurred, con- 
sciously or unconsciously, to suggest to him certain of the 
essential principles of the " New Analytic of Logical Forms." 

He has a separate treatise on metaphysics ("Metaphysical 
Synopsis," 1742) which he divides into ontology, or the sci- 
ence of being, and pneumatology, or the science of spirit 
(divine and human). " It appears from his treatise on meta- 
physics," says his admiring biographer, "that he was well 
acquainted with the logomachies, meaningless questions, and 
trivial debates of the old scholastics, which had thrown a thick 
darkness on that part of philosophy : he has set that branch of 
knowledge in a clear light, and rendered it instructive and enter- 
taining." The sneer at the scholastics is a symptom of the 
age. The alleged " meaningless questions " are still put, and 
must be put, by profound thinkers who would go down to the 
foundations of truth. Even Hutcheson was obliged to put them 
and to answer them. The answers which he gives, if not so 
profound in fact or in appearance as those given by the ancient 
Greek philosophers, by the scholastics, or by Descartes and 
Leibnitz, are always clear and sensible, and often just and satis- 
factory. He discusses, and this by no means in a superficial 
manner, topics which the Scottish metaphysicians between him 
and Hamilton carefully avoided. His scholastic training at 
Killyleagh, and the spirit of the older teaching, had still a hold 
upon him for good. 

He treats of being, declaring it to be ^indefinable, and show- 
ing that it involves existence and essence, and that potency 
and action are the principles of being. He refers the convic- 
tion of our identity of being to consciousness. As to the much 
agitated question of the principle of individuation he comes to 
the sound conclusion that it is to be ascribed to the nature of 
the thing existing. 

He discusses the question whether metaphysical axioms are 
innate. He denies that they are innate in the sense of their 
being known or observed by the mind from its birth, and affirms 
that in their general form they are not reached till after many 
comparisons of singular ideas. He shows that the mind assents 
to them in their singular form, even when a sensible object is 
presented. He stands up for axioms, self-evident and immuta- 



74 FRANCIS HUTCHESON. [Art. vii. 

ble, — with him, as with Locke, self-evidence being their promi- 
nent feature and their mark ; but he also declares them to be 
eternal and unchangeable, — the mind perceiving at once the 
agreement or disagreement of the subject or predicate. He 
denies that there is any principle entitled to be regarded as the 
first of all, and maintains that it is vain to seek any other crite- 
rion of truth than the faculty of reason itself, and the native 
power of the mind. These views are surely more profound than 
those of Locke, less extravagant than those of Descartes, Leib- 
nitz, or Wolf (he refers to Wolf). They do not exhaust the 
subject ; in particular, while he says truly (with Aristotle) that 
the singulars and the less general are first known, he does not 
enter on the question, which neither the Scottish nor any other 
metaphysicians have yet settled, of the relation of self-evident 
truths in their singular to their generalized form. 

In regard to space and time, he avoids the extreme posi- 
tions both of Clarke, who represents them as modes of the 
divine being, and of Leibnitz, who describes them as mere 
relations perceived by the mind. He represents them as things 
or realities, and declares modestly and truly that we are igno- 
rant of the relation in which they stand towards the divine 
nature. These judicious views were followed by the Scottish 
metaphysicians generally down to the time of Hamilton. 

This leads him into the investigation of the infinite. He 
regards the following propositions as probable : that it is 
scarcely possible that there should be a number of infinite things 
of the same kind ; that the infinite, because it is infinite, cannot 
be greater ; that infinites, so far as infinites, cannot be multi- 
plied ; nor can have any finite relation {rationem) to finite parts, 
although things by one reason infinite and by another finite 
may be divided and multiplied, if only there are other things of 
the same description. But after enunciating these bold propo- 
sitions he cautiously adds that these questions may well be held 
to surpass human capacity. 

He declares that, properly speaking, there is only one sort of 
cause, the efficient. He says that in the impulse and motion 
of bodies, and in the effort to change the idea in our minds, 
and to produce motions in our bodily members, we not only 
see change, but perceive some energy or efficacy. This view 
is not thoroughly carried out ; it certainly is the truth so far as 



Art. vii.] CLASSIFICATION OF SENSES. 75 

it goes. He cautions us, in the very spirit of Reid, against 
dogmatizing too minutely as to the power of the mind over the 
body. 

Substance is that which remains when the affections change- 
He agrees with Locke that the nature of substance is unknown* 
except that we have an obscure idea of something as the sub- 
stratum of qualities. His views on this whole subject are 
meagre and unsatisfactory. 

Still it is in the discussion of these questions that he passes 
beyond Shaftesbury, and shows the clearness, the judicious- 
ness, and the independence of his thinking. I am not sure 
whether these metaphysical topics have been discussed in a 
profounder manner by any thinker of the Scottish school except 
Sir W. Hamilton ; and he has not shown the same amount of 
speculative caution and good sense as Hutcheson. 

But Hutcheson dwells far more on the motive and moral 
parts of man's nature than on logical and metaphysical sub- 
jects. We have seen that he brings in many other senses 
besides the external ones. He defines sense, " every determi- 
nation of our minds to receive ideas independently on our will, 
and to have perceptions of pleasure and pain." The following 
is his classification of them : " 1. In the first class are the exter- 
nal senses, universally known. 2. In the second, the pleasant 
perceptions arising from regular harmonious uniform objects, as 
also from grandeur and novelty. These we may call, after Mr. 
Addison, the ' pleasures of the imagination,' or we may call the 
power of receiving them an internal sense. Whoever dislikes 
this name may substitute another. 3. The next class of per- 
ceptions we may call a public sense ; viz., our determination to 
be pleased with the happiness of others, and to be uneasy at 
their misery. This is found in some degree in all men, and 
was sometimes called KoivovotjfAoavv)], or sensus communis, by the 
ancients ; this inward pain or compassion cannot be called a 
sensation of sight. It solely arises from an opinion of misery 
felt by another, and not immediately from a visible form. The 
same form presented to the eye by the exactest painting, or the 
action of a player, gives no pain to those who remember that 
there is no misery felt. When men by imagination conceive 
real pain felt by an actor, without recollecting that it is merely 



76 FRANCIS HUTCHESON. [Art. vii. 

feigned, or when they think of the real story represented, then, 
as there is a confused opinion of real misery, there is also pain 
in compassion. 4. The fourth class we may call the moral sense, 
by which we perceive virtue or vice in ourselves or others. 
This is plainly distinct from the former class of perceptions, 
since many are strongly affected with the fortunes of others 
who seldom reflect upon virtue or vice in themselves or others 
as an object ; as we may find in natural affection, compassion, 
friendship, or even general benevolence to mankind, which con- 
nect our happiness or pleasure with that of others, even when 
we are not reflecting upon our own temper, nor delighted with 
the perception of our own virtue. 5. The fifth class is a sense 
of honor which makes the approbation or gratitude of others, 
for any good actions we have done, the necessary occasion of 
pleasure, and then dislike, condemnation, or resentment of inju- 
ries done by us, the occasion of that uneasy sensation called 
shame, even when we fear no further evil from them." He 
adds that this enumeration may not be sufficient, and says that 
" there may be others, such as some ideas of decency, dignity, 
suitableness to human nature in certain actions and circum- 
stances." 

He then shows that the objects gratifying these senses call 
forth desires, which fall into five corresponding classes, those 
of the bodily senses, of the imagination or internal sense, of 
public happiness, of virtue, and honor. We are yet (so I am 
inclined to think) without a thoroughly exhaustive classifi- 
cation of the natural appetencies which lead to emotion, and 
desire, and action. That of Hutcheson is one of the best which 
we yet have, and should be looked to by those who would draw 
out a scheme of the categories of man's motive principles. I 
am disposed to think, however, that the sense of honor may 
be resolved into the moral sense combined with some other 
principles. (" Moral Philosophy," Book I.) 

He shows how secondary grow upon these original desires. 
" Since we are capable of reflection, memory, observation, and 
reasoning about the distant tendencies of objects and actions, 
and not confined to things present, there must arise, in conse- 
quence of our original desires, secondary desires of every thing 
imagined useful to gratify any of the primary desires, and that 



Art. vii.] ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 77 

with strength proportioned to the several original desires and 
the imagined usefulness or necessity of the advantageous 
object. Thus, as soon as we come to apprehend the use of 
wealth or power to gratify any of our original desires we must 
also desire them. Hence arises the universality of these desires 
of wealth and power, since they are the means of gratifying 
all other desires." Mackintosh says, " He seems to have been 
the first who entertained just notions of the formation of 
the secondary desires which had been overlooked by Butler." 
(" Passions," Sect. I. Mackintosh's " Diss.," Sect. V.) 

He also shows how the association of ideas, which he char- 
acterizes as the "disposition in our nature to associate any 
ideas together for the future which once presented themselves 
jointly," has an influence upon our desires, primary and second- 
ary, and specially on our sense of beauty. " Some objects 
which, of themselves, are indifferent to any sense, yet by reason 
of some additional grateful idea may become very desirable, or 
by like addition of an ungrateful idea may raise the strongest 
aversion. When any circumstance, dress, state, posture, is con- 
stituted as a mark of infamy, it may become, in like manner, 
the object of aversion, though in itself most inoffensive to our 
senses. If a certain way of living, of receiving company, of 
showing courtesy, is once received among those who are hon- 
ored, they who cannot bear the expense of all this may be made 
uneasy at their condition, though much freer from trouble than 
that of higher stations. Thus dress, retinue, equipage, furni- 
ture, behavior, and diversions, are made matters of considerable 
importance by additional ideas." "The beauty of trees, their 
cool shades and their aptness to conceal from observation, have 
made groves and woods the usual retreat to those who love soli- 
tude, especially to the religious, the pensive, the melancholy, 
and the amorous. And do not we find that we have so joined 
the ideas of these dispositions of mind with those external ob- 
jects, that they always recur to us along with them." He thus 
started those views regarding the influence of association of 
ideas on our perceptions of beauty and moral good which w T ere 
prosecuted by Turnbull, Beattie, and others, till they culminated 
in the ingenious but extravagant theories of Alison and Jeffrey 
in regard to the beautiful, and of Adam Smith and Mackintosh 
as to virtue. Hutcheson certainly has not developed the full 



78 FRANCIS HUTCHESON. [Art. vii. 

influence of asssociation of ideas, but the account which he 
gives is just, so far as it goes. 1 

He dwells at great length on the sense of beauty. The 
feeling is raised at once on the perception of certain objects- 
He does not stand up for beauty supposed to be in the nature 
of things without relation to any mind perceiving it. On the 
contrary, all beauty implies the perception of some mind. Still 
there may be a distinction drawn between original or absolute 
beauty on the one hand, and relative or comparative beauty on 
the other. By the former he understands the beauty which we 
perceive in objects without comparison with any thing external, 
such as that observed in the works of nature, artificial forms, 
figures, theorems ; by the latter, the beauty founded on uni- 
formity, or a kind of unity between the original and the copy. 
In determining what the beautiful is, he propounds the theory 
that it is a compound ratio of uniformity and variety, so that 
where the uniformity of bodies is equal, the beauty is as the 
variety ; and where the variety is equal, the beauty is as the 
uniformity. He seeks to establish this view by examples, 
dwelling on beautiful objects in nature and art, showing how 
there is in all of them uniformity or unity, proportion or har- 
mony. This doctrine may not be the full theory of beauty ; 
but there must surely be some truth in it ; for in some modifi- 
cation or other it has cast up among profound thinkers in all 
ages, from Plato and Augustine in ancient times, to Cousin, 
Macvicar, and Ruskin in our day. 

He stands up resolutely for the existence of disinterested 
and social affections. He earnestly opposes those who, like 
the Cyrenaics, and probably the Epicureans, would make 
pleasure the end of existence, and who would make us desire 
the good of others or of societies merely as the means of our 
own safety and prosperity, or as the means of some subtler 

1 There is a curious book, " An Introduction towards an Essay on the Origin 
of the Passions, in which it is endeavored to be shown how they are all acquired, 
and that they are no other than Associations of Ideas of our own making, or what 
we learn of others," London, printed for R. Dodsley, at Tully's Head in Pall Mall, 
and sold by T. Cooper, at the Globe in Paternoster Row, 1741. It is a mere 
fragment of thirty-two pages. The author says that the arguments made use of 
by Locke in order to prove that there are no innate ideas will, I think, hold fully 
as strong against all implanted appetites, or whatsoever " actions which we style 
moral or immoral, virtuous or vicious, are approved and disapproved, not by nat- 
ure and constitution, but by habit and association." 



Art. vii.] THE MORAL SENSE. yg 

pleasures of our own by sympathy with others in their hap- 
piness ; or who would make our end to be the pleasure we 
enjoy in being honored, or some reward we expect for our ser- 
vices, and these either from God or man. He opposes also 
that more refined system which makes our aim the joys pro- 
ceeding from generous motions and moral approbation. He 
shows, with great acuteness, that in all our desires, whether 
benevolent or selfish, there is some motive, some end intended 
distinct from the joy of success, or the removal of the pain of 
desire ; and that there is first the motive operating, and then 
the joy or pain following, according as the motive is gratified or 
thwarted. He proves that men have affections, such as the 
love of offspring and of relatives, which fit them for a state of 
society ; he takes pains to show that in this respect he differs 
from Puffendorf, who constructs his theory of society on the 
principle that self-love is the spring of all our actions ; and he 
offers a most determined opposition to Hobbes when he makes 
the natural state of man to be one of war. 

A considerable portion of all his works is occupied in demon- 
strating that man is possessed of a moral sense. In his 
" Inquiry," published before Butler's " Sermons on Human 
Nature," he declares, " that from the very frame of our nature 
we are determined to perceive pleasure in the practice of virtue, 
and to approve of it when practised by ourselves or others." 
He declares that the vast diversity of moral principles in vari- 
ous ages and nations " is indeed a good argument against 
innate ideas or principles, but will not evidence mankind to be 
void of a moral sense to perceive virtue or vice in actions." 
He ever kindles into a gentle warmth when he speaks of the 
joys derived from this sense, which he represents as purer and 
more elevated than those which can be had from any other 
source. The conscience, though often unable to govern our 
inferior nature, is yet in its own nature born for government ; 
it is the ruling principle (to rjytnonxoi) to which all things had 
been subjected in the entire {integro) state of our nature, and 
to which they ought to be subjected. His views on the subject 
of the supremacy of conscience are not so thoroughly wrought 
out as those of Butler ; but they are explicitly stated, and 
become more decisive in his later works. 

But what is the quality in actions looked at, appreciated, and 



So FRANCIS HUTCHESON. [Art. vii. 

approved by the moral sense ? To this question Hutcheson 
gives, if not a satisfactory, a very decisive reply. He repre- 
sents this quality as good-will or benevolence. "All those 
kind affections which incline us to make others happy, and all 
actions which flow from such affections, appear morally good, 
if while they are benevolent towards some persons they be not 
pernicious to others." Advancing a step farther, he discovers 
that "the several affections which are approved, though in very 
different degrees, yet all agree in one general character of 
tendency to the happiness of others," and the most perfectly 
virtuous actions are such " as appear to have the most unlim- 
ited tendency to the greatest and most extensive happiness of 
all the rational agents to whom our influence can reach." He 
is evidently inclined to reckon the moral sense as planted in 
our nature to lead us to commend at once those actions which 
tend towards the general happiness. His theory of virtue thus 
comes to be an exalted kind of eudaimonism, with God giving 
us a moral sense to approve of the promotion of happiness 
without our discovering the consequences of actions. Hume 
required only to leave out the divine sanction (he retained 
some sort of moral sense) in order to reach his theory of virtue 
consisting in the useful and agreeable. Hutcheson opposes 
very resolutely all those moralists who seek to give morality a 
deeper foundation in the nature of things. The function of 
reason in morals is simply to show what external actions are 
laudable or censurable, according as they evidence good or evil 
affections of soul. 1 

Proceeding on these principles, derived mainly from Shaftes- 
bury, but more systematically expounded, he builds up a 
system of moral philosophy. He gives a division of the 
virtues, and treats of the duties we owe toward God, toward 
mankind, and toward ourselves. In proving the existence of 
God, he appeals to the structure of the world. He reaches the 
divine perfections by a set of metaphysical principles surrepti- 
tiously introduced, and scarcely consistent with his philosophy. 

1 There is a work, " An Examination of the Scheme of Morality advanced by 
Dr. Hutcheson, late Professor of Morality in the University of Glasgow," 1759, 
in which the author criticises Hutcheson's whole doctrine of senses, instincts, 
affections ; and objects to his attempts to reduce all virtue and religion to 
benevolence or good-will to others, and also to his doctrine of moral sense as 
a faculty. 



Art. vii.] HIS SYSTEM OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY. 8 1 

He answers the objections derived from the existence of evil 
in a commonplace way, by showing how particular evils are 
necessary to superior good. He seeks to establish the immor- 
tality of the soul by an appeal to the nature of the soul as 
being different from the body, and to the hopes of a future 
state. 

He enters at great length into the discussion of the ages 
which preceded him, as to the law of nature. He shows that 
there are rights antecedent to the institution of civil govern- 
ment. He establishes the right of property, first, on the prin- 
ciple that " things fit for present use the first occupier should 
enjoy undisturbed ; " and on the farther principle, that each 
has a right to the fruits of his own labor, and that it is the 
common interest of society, and tends towards the furtherance 
of industry, that mankind should be secured in their posses- 
sions. 

He says that "civil power is most naturally founded by these 
three different acts of a whole people : I. An agreement or 
contract of each one with all the rest, that they will unite into 
one society or body, to be governed in all their common inter- 
ests by one council ; 2. A decree or designation made by the 
whole people of the form or plan of power and of the persons 
to be intrusted with it ; 3. A mutual agreement or contract 
between the governors thus constituted and the people, the 
former obliging themselves to a faithful administration of the 
powers vested in them for the common interest, and the latter 
obliging themselves to obedience. Though it is not probable 
that, in the constitution of the several states, men have gener- 
ally taken these three regular steps ; yet it is plain that, in 
every just constitution of power, there is some such transaction 
as implicitly contains the whole force of all the three." He 
argues that the people have a right of resistance, and of 
dethroning a prince who is grossly perfidious to his trust. 

He thinks that the senate of the country should create a 
censorial power, " that by it the manners of the people may 
be regulated, and luxury, voluptuous debauchery, and other 
private vices prevented or made infamous." He holds that the 
" magistrate should provide proper instruction for all, espe- 
cially for young minds, about the existence, goodness, and 
providence of God, and all the social duties of life and motives 

6 



%2 FRANCIS HUTCHESON. [Art. vii. 

to them." But he particularly maintains that " every rational 
creature has a right to judge for itself in these matters." 
While an earnest supporter of liberty of thought and action, he 
yet holds " as to those who support atheism, or deny a moral 
providence, or the obligation of the moral law, or social virtues, 
that the state may justly restrain them by force, as hurting it 
in its most important interests." 

When Calamy heard of Hutcheson's call to Glasgow, he 
smiled, and said he was not for Scotland, and that he would be 
reckoned there as unorthodox as Simson. But Hutcheson 
lived an age later than Simson ; he was much more prudent, 
and was personally liked ; he was professor of philosophy and 
not of theology ; and so he passed through life with very little 
public opposition. Still the stone which he had set a-moving 
could not go on without meeting with some little ruffling. 
About the beginning of the session 1737-38, a paper was 
printed and published anonymously by one who professed to 
have been lately in the college, charging Hutcheson with teach- 
ing dangerous views. I have not seen this attack ; but the 
reply prepared by a body of his favorite students is preserved. 
There seems to be force in some of the objections taken ; 
others entirely fail. It is objected to him that he taught that 
we could have the knowledge of moral good and evil, although 
we knew nothing of the being of a God ; it is replied that 
Hutcheson's doctrine was that we might have knowledge of 
some virtues, though we had not known God, and that a notion 
of moral good must come prior to any notion of the will or law 
of God. It is objected that he taught that the tendency to 
promote the happiness of others is the standard of moral good- 
ness ; it is acknowledged in the answer that benevolent affec- 
tions towards others are our primary notion of moral goodness, 
and the primary object of our approbation. It is objected that 
he taught that it is sometimes lawful to tell a lie ; it is 
answered that Hutcheson's doctrine was very much against 
lying, but did imply that there might be cases in which lying 
was justifiable. 

Throughout Scotland there was an impression among the 
scholars who had been trained in the previous generation that 
he was sensualizing and degrading the old philosophy. The 
friends of evangelical truth perceived that the young preachers 



Art. vii.] WITHERSPOON'S SATIRES. 83 

who admired him addressed them in a very different speech 
from that of their old divines and from that of the inspired 
writers. The description given of the new style of preaching 
by the clerical satirist Witherspoon, in his " Characteristics," 
was found to have point and edge : " It is quite necessary in a 
moderate man, because his moderation teaches him, to avoid 
all the high flights of evangelic enthusiasm and the mysteries 
of grace of which the common people are so fond. It may be 
observed, nay, it is observed, that all our stamp avoid the word 
grace as much as possible, and have agreed to substitute the 
' moral virtues ' in the room of the ' graces of the Spirit.' 
Where an old. preacher would have said a great degree of 
sanctification, a man of moderation and politeness will say a 
high pitch of virtue." In the advice to a good preacher the 
following counsels are given : " 1. His subjects must be con- 
fined to the social duties. 2. He must recommend them only 
from rational considerations ; viz., the beauty and comely pro- 
portions of virtue, and its advantages in the present life, without 
any regard to a future state of more extended self-interest. 
3. His authorities must be drawn from heathen writers ; none, 
or as few as possible, from Scripture. 4. He must be very 
unacceptable to the common people." " The scattering a few 
phrases in their sermons, as harmony, order, proportion, taste, 
sense of beauty, balance of the affections, will easily persuade 
the people that they are learned ; and this persuasion is to all 
intents and purposes the same thing as if it were true. It is 

one of those deceitful feelings which Mr. H in his essays 

has shown to be beautiful and useful." In illustrating the 
third counsel he says : " It is well known there are multitudes 
in our island who reckon Socrates and Plato to have been 
much greater men than any of the apostles, although (as the 
moderate preacher I mentioned lately told his hearers) the 
apostle Paul had a university education and was instructed in 
logic by Gamaliel. Therefore let religion be constantly and 
uniformly called virtue, and let the heathen philosophers be set 
up as great patterns and promoters of it. Upon this head 
most particularly recommend M. Antoninus by name, because 
an eminent person of the moderate character says his ' Medita- 
tions ' are the best book that ever was written for forming the 
heart." The effect of this accommodation of religion to the 






84 FRANCIS HUTCHESON. [Art. vii. 

world is graphically and truly described : " The necessity of 
such a conduct cannot be denied when it is considered what 
effect the length and frequency of public devotion have had in 
driving most of the fashionable gentry from our churches 
altogether." " Now the only way to regain them to the church 
is to accommodate the worship as much as may be to their 
taste." " I confess there has sometimes been an ugly objec- 
tion thrown up against this part of my argument ; viz., that this 
desertion of public worship by those in high life seems, in fact, 
to be contemporary with, and to increase in a pretty exact pro- 
portion to, the attempts that have been made and are made to 
suit it to their taste." 

Hutcheson's works got fit audience in his own day, but did 
not continue to be much read after his death. In his mode 
and manner of writing he is evidently indebted to the wits of 
Queen Anne, such as Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, Pope, and 
Swift, who were Frenchifying the English tongue, polishing 
away at once its roughness and its vigor, introducing the French 
clearness of expression, and, we may add, the French morals. 
Hutcheson has their clearness, but is without their liveliness 
and wit. His style is like a well-fenced, level country, in which 
we weary walking for any length of time ; it is not relished by 
those who prefer elevations and depressions, and is disliked by 
those who have a passion for mountains and passes. He ever 
maintains a high moral tone ; but it is doubtful whether he has 
retained for morality a sufficiently deep foundation. 

His philosophy is undoubtedly an advance upon that of 
Locke, and rises immeasurably above that of those professed 
followers of Locke in England and France, who in the days of 
Hutcheson were leaving out Locke's reflection, and deriving 
all man's ideas from sensation, and all his motives from pleas- 
ures and pains. His view of the moral faculty is correct so 
far as it goes. He represents it as natural to man, and in his 
very constitution and nature. There may even be a propriety 
in calling it a sense with the qualifying phrase moral, inasmuch 
as, like the senses, it is a source of knowledge, revealing to us 
certain qualities of voluntary acts or agents, and inasmuch as 
it has always feeling or sensibility attached to its exercises. 

But, on the other hand, his view of the moral power falls 
greatly beneath that of the great English moralists of the pre- 



Art. vii.] DEFECTS OF HIS MORAL SYSTEM. 85 

vious century, and below that of the school of Clarke in his 
own day. The word sense allies the conscience too much with 
the animal organism, and the whole account given of it separates 
it from the reason or higher intelligence. On this point he 
was met, immediately on the publication of his views, by Gilbert 
Burnet, who maintains that moral good and evil are discerned 
by reason ; that there is first reason, or an internal sense of 
truth and falsehood, moral good and evil, right and wrong, 
which is accompanied by another succeeding internal sense of 
beauty and pleasure ; and that reason is the judge of the good- 
ness and badness of our affections and of the moral sense itself. 
Hutcheson does speak of the moral sense as being superior in 
its nature to the other senses, but he does not bring out so 
prominently and decisively as Butler did its supremacy and its 
right to govern. 

If his theory of the moral power is superficial and defective, 
his account of that to which the conscience looks is positively 
erroneous. He represents virtue as consisting in benevolence, 
by which he means good-will. This view cannot be made to 
embrace love to God, except by stretching it so wide as to 
make it another doctrine altogether ; for surely it is not as a 
mere exercise of good-will that to love God can be described as 
excellent. His theory is especially faulty in that it overlooks 
justice, which has ever been regarded by our higher moralists 
as among the most essential of the virtues. Nor is it to be 
omitted that his moral system is self-righteous in its injunc- 
tions, and pagan in its spirit. No doubt he speaks everywhere 
with deep admiration of the morality of the New Testament ; 
but the precepts which he inculcates, are derived fully as much 
from Antoninus and the Stoics as from the discourses of our 
Lord, and the epistles of the apostles ; and we look in vain for 
a recommendation of such graces as repentance and humility, 
meekness and long-suffering. 

By bringing down morality from the height at which the 
great ethical writers, of ancient and modern times, had placed 
it, he prepared the way for the system of Adam Smith, and 
even for that of Hume. Smith was a pupil of his own, and 
Hutcheson was brought into contact with Hume. Hume sub- 
mitted to Hutcheson in manuscript the " Third Part of his 
Treatise of Human Nature," that on morals, before giving it 



86 RELIGIOUS CONFLICTS. [Art. viii. 

to the world. The remarks which Hutcheson offered have 
been lost, but we can gather what they were from the letter 
which Hume sent him on receiving them, and which has been 
preserved. Hutcheson most characteristically objects to Hume, 
that he had not expressed a sufficient warmth in the cause of 
virtue, and that he was defective in point of prudence. Was 
this all that the high moralist Hutcheson had to object to the 
founder of modern utilitarianism ? On the publication of his 
" Institutes of Moral Philosophy," Hutcheson sends a copy of it 
to Hume, who remarks upon it, specially objecting to it as 
adopting Butler's opinion, that our moral sense has an authority 
distinct from its force and desirableness ; but confessing his 
delight "to see such just philosophy, and such instructive 
morals, to have once set their foot in the schools. I hope they 
will next get into the world, and then into the churches." Yes, 
this was what the rationalists wished in that day, and what 
they wish in ours, to get their views into the churches. Hutche- 
son, though disapproving of the philosophy of Hume, and refus- 
ing to support him as a candidate for the chair of moral 
philosophy in Edinburgh, which he himself declined, had not 
retained sufficiently deep principles to enable him successfully 
to resist the great sceptic who had now appeared. Error has 
been committed, God's law has been lowered, and the avenger 
has come. 



WW.— RELIGIOUS CONFLICTS. —RALPH ERSKINE. 

We are now in the heart of the Scottish conflicts of the century. It is 
the crisis of the contest between Cavalier and Whig. On one point the 
philosophers and the evangelicals agree : they are defenders of the House 
of Hanover and opponents of the Pretender and the Stuarts, of whom they 
could not expect that they would be supporters of culture on the one hand, 
or of Protestantism on the other. The last formidable contest between 
Jacobite and Whig, was decided in behalf of the latter in 1746, at Culloden ; 
and henceforth the former is sinking into a state of complaining and garru- 
lous, though often lively, old age. The religious conflicts are deeper, and 
continue for a longer period. From the time of Hutcheson, there is a felt 
and known feud, not always avowed, between the new philosophy and the old 
theology. It would have been greatly for the benefit of both, had there been 
one to reconcile and unite them. In the absence of such, each ran its own 



Art. viii.] RELIGIOUS PARTIES. 87 

course and did its own work, being good so far as it went, and evil only in 
its narrowness and exclusiveness, in what it overlooked or denied. The 
philosophers were laudably engaged when they were unfolding man's intel- 
lectual, esthetic, and moral nature ; but they missed the deepest properties 
of human nature, when, in the fear of the ghosts of fanaticism, they took no 
notice of man's feelings of want, his sense of sin, and his longing after God 
and immortality; and the views of theologians would have been more just 
and profound, had they observed — always in the inductive manner of the 
Scottish school — those nascent ideas of good and evil and infinity which 
are at the basis of all religious knowledge and belief. The evangelical 
preachers were only faithful to their great Master when they declined to 
allow the doctrines of grace to sink out of sight ; but they erred so far as 
they opposed the refinement and liberal sentiments which the moral philos- 
ophers were introducing, and showed that they were incapable of fully 
appreciating the apostolic command, " Whatsoever things are true, what- 
soever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are 
pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if 
there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things." 
Pity it is that it should be so, but it is only by vibrations that the world 
moves on, only by breezes that its atmosphere is kept pure ; and when the 
church errs by cowardice, it has to be rebuked by the unbelieving as — an 
old Covenanter might have said — the father of the faithful was rebuked by 
a pagan Egyptian. It was only in a later age, and mainly through the influ- 
ence of Chalmers, that the church was prepared heartily to accept what was 
true in the Scottish philosophy, and to acknowledge its compatibility with 
the doctrine of salvation by grace. 

Three distinct religious parties are being formed in Scotland, not includ- 
ing the covenanting "remnant," who never submitted to the Revolution 
settlement, and whose vocation was on the mountains, rather than the col- 
leges of their country. First, in the Church of Scotland there is the 
" Moderate " type of minister crystallized by coldness out of the floating 
elements. He is or he affects to be elegant and tolerant, and he is terribly 
afraid of a zealous religious life. He wishes to produce among the people 
a morality without religion, or at least without any of the peculiar dogmas 
of Christianity. As yet he himself is a moral man, and the people are 
moral, for they believe in the old theology ; in the next age both pastors and 
people, retaining little faith, become considerably immoral, showing that, if 
we would have the fruit good, we must make the tree good. This party, 
preaching moral sermons without doctrine, is the genuine product of the 
Scottish philosophy in the Church of Scotland. 

Secondly, the Evangelical party, called by their opponents 'zealots' and 
'highflyers,' were placed in an ambiguous position and shorn of much of 
their strength since the enforcement of the law of patronage. They are fast 
becoming a minority, and a small minority, in the church ; and they have to 
submit to much that they abhor, as, for example, to the settlement of pastors 
contrary to the will of the people. But they labor earnestly to keep alive 
the fire all through the dark and wild night ; they cherish fellowship with 
other evangelical churches, and anticipate the missionary spirit of a later 



88 RALPH ERSKINE. [Art. viii. 

age by countenancing the " Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowl- 
edge." They come into collision with the philosophic moralists, by main- 
taining so resolutely the doctrines of grace ; and they carry their antagonism 
to the " legal " system to the very verge of Antinomianism, as shown in 
their favor for the "Marrow of Divinity," this by a reaction prompting the 
moral divines to preach a morality without an atonement for immorality. 

Thirdly, beyond the Established Church, the Seceding body, encompassed 
with hardships as fierce as the storms, but breathing a spirit as free as 
the air of their country, are rallying around them the old-fashioned and 
more determined religious life of Scotland. At this stage of its history it 
serves itself heir to the Covenants of the previous century, blames the 
Church of Scotland for being too indulgent, is intolerant of toleration, and 
has little sympathy with other churches. This body is beneath the notice 
of the philosophers ; and in return it shows its utter distrust of them by 
declining to allow its students to attend the classes of moral philosophy, 
and appointing a professor of its own to give instruction in that branch, on 
which, as on other high departments of learning, it continued to set a high 
value. 

The event of that period which agitated lowland Scotland more than even 
the inroad of the Pretender was the preaching of Whitefield, which moved 
the common people as the winds do the trees of the forest. The moderate 
party affected to despise and actually hated the preacher and his doctrine. 
The evangelicals in the Established Church rejoiced in his labors and their 
fruits. The seceders might have triumphed in his success ; but they ex- 
pected him to identify himself with their peculiar ecclesiastical constitution, 
and stand by them in" the fight for the old cause of the Covenant. Upon 
Whitefield declining to do this, they became jealous of his influence, and 
were in doubts about the sound character of the revivals which he was the 
means of awakening. Out of this arose a very curious controversy, for- 
gotten by all but a few antiquarians, but not unworthy of being noticed. 

Mr. Robe, belonging to the evangelical party in the Church of Scotland, 
and a promoter of revivals and of the lively feeling manifested in them, 
declared that "our senses and imagination are greatly helpful to bring us 
to the "knowledge of the divine nature and perfections ; " and in defending 
this he asked : " Can you or any man else think upon Christ really as he is, 
God-man, without an imaginary idea of it?" To this Ralph Erskine, the 
seceder, replies in a treatise of 372 closely printed pages, entitled " Faith 
no Fancy ; or a Treatise of Mental Images, discovering the Vain Philosophy 
and Vile Divinity of a late Pamphlet entitled ' Mr. Robe's Fourth Letter to Mr. 
Fisher,' and showing that an Imaginary Idea of Christ as Man (when sup- 
posed to belong to Saving Faith, whether in its Act or Object) imports noth- 
ing but Ignorance, Atheism, Idolatry, great Falsehood, or gross Delusion " 
(1745). He says of Mr. Robe : " This way of speaking appears indeed new 
and strange divinity to me, and makes the object of faith truly a sensible 
object ; not the object of faith, but of sense." This leads him to criticise 
various philosophies. He refers to Tertullian (as quoted by Jerome), who 
in regard to Platonic ideas said, " Haereticorum patriarchs philosophi." He 
shows him that the learned De Vries, Mastricht, and other eminent doctors 



Art. ix.] ARCHIBALD CAMPBELL. 89 

and divines abroad, had noticed how the ideal doctrine of Cartesius and his 
followers had led to imagery and idolatry. He also criticises Locke with 
considerable skill. "There seems nothing more common in the experience 
of mankind than that a man who hath the greatest stock of habitual knowl- 
edge and understanding relating to many truths, yet while his body sleeps, 
or his mind is in a muse about other things, he perceives none of these 
truths." So " I see no greater absurdity in saying one may have a stock of 
seminal or habitual knowledge, though he have no actual knowledge, than 
to say one may have a stock of senses, though he hath no actual sensa- 
tion, or consciousness of the acts or exercise of any of his senses, as a 
child not born or a man in a deep sleep ; or a natural store of affections sub- 
jectively in him, and yet affected with nothing till occasions and objects 
appear. One may have a good pair of eyes, and yet see nothing till light be 
given and objects be presented. Nor is it an improper way of speaking to say 
a man hath not his eyes or sight, though he be not actually seeing. And 
as little is it improper to say a man hath understanding and knowledge? 
though he be not actually knowing or perceiving the truths he has the im- 
press of in his understanding." This is a wonderfully clear statement of 
the distinctions between the seminal capacity and the actual ideas, between 
a laid-up stock and occasions, by which philosophers have sought to over- 
throw the theory of Locke. In regard to the special question discussed, 
Mr. Robe had quoted the received rule, " Oportet intelligentem phantas- 
mata speculari." Erskine quotes against him Hieroboord, " Mens non 
indiget semper phantasmata ad suas perceptiones." " The object of that 
idea is only corporeal things as corporeal ; but the object of rational 
knowledge is not only corporeal things, but spiritual and corporeal things, 
not as corporeal, but as intelligible." " It is reason, and not sense, that 
is the only help to attain the natural knowledge of God and his perfections." 
Above reason he places faith. " True faith differs as much from, and is 
as far above, mere intellectual ideas as intellectual ideas are above cor- 
poreal and imaginary ideas ; yea, much farther than human reason is above 
sense ; even as far as what is above human and supernatural, is above 
merely natural." It is evident that there are curious questions started, 
though not precisely settled, as to the place which the phantasm has 
in thought, and the imagination in religion. We feel that we are in the 
society of men of reflection and of reading. The evangelical and the 
seceding ministers of these days are quite as erudite as the academic men 
who despised them, and are holding firmly by old truths which the new 
philosophy is overlooking. 



IX.— ARCHIBALD CAMPBELL. 

He was a pupil of Professor Simson's, in Glasgow, and became minister 
of Tarbert in Stirlingshire. I have been able to collect few notices of him. 
He is worthy of being mentioned, as having had played upon him one of 
the basest tricks mentioned in literary history. He wrote a treatise on 



90 ALEXANDER MONCRIEFF. [Art. x. 

" Moral Virtue," and sent it up to London to his friend, Alexander Innes, 
D.D., assistant at St. Margaret's, Westminster, to have it published; and 
Innes published it in his own name, with the date, Tothill Fields, Jan. 20, 
1727-28. In 1730, Campbell went to London and exposed Innes's impost- 
ure. It seems that the Lord Chancellor, believing that Innes was the 
author of the work, presented him to a living. The Chancellor, being con- 
vinced of the deceit, sought to make amends by offering a living to Camp- 
bell, who declined the offer, saying that he preferred his own country ; and 
he becomes professor of ecclesiastical history in St. Andrews. In 1733, 
he published the work in his own name, dating it St. Andrews, and dis- 
owning the " Prefatory Introduction " and " some little marginal notes of 
Innes." "An Inquiry into the Original of Moral Virtue, wherein is 
shown, against the Author of the Fable of the Bees, that Virtue is founded 
in the Nature of Things, is unalterable and eternal, and the great Means of 
Private and Public Happiness, with some Reflections on a late Book enti- 
tled 'An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. 1 " 
Hutcheson, whom he thus assailed, spoke of him as no better than a disci- 
ple of Epicurus. His system is the baldest form of self-love. " Human 
nature is originally formed to pleasure and pain." " There is, indeed, a 
distinction of goodness into natural and moral, but the latter as well as the 
former lies wholly in pleasure." " God and all mankind are governed by 
one common principle, viz., self-love." " They can favor or esteem no 
other beings but as they gratify this principle." "The affections and 
actions that correspond to the self-love of our own species are likewise 
agreeable to the self-love of the Deity." " From self-love we desire the love 
and esteem of other intelligent beings." There is a passage in which there 
is an anticipation of Smith's theory of sympathy : " Whatever tenderness 
we conceive in favor of other people, it comes from putting ourselves in 
their circumstances, and must therefore be resolved into self-love." He 
also wrote a treatise on the " Necessity of Revelation," 1739 5 an d another, 
" Oratio de Vanitate Luminis Naturae." He thinks it impossible that man- 
kind, left to themselves, should 'discover' the great truths and articles of 
natural religion, or should be capable of giving a system to natural religion." 
He died in April, 1756. A posthumous work, "The Authenticity of the 
Gospel History," was published 1759. He was opposed by 



^.—ALEXANDER MONCRIEFF} 

Alexander Moncrieff of Culfergie in the parish of Abernethy was edu- 
cated at the grammar school of Perth and St. Andrews University, and be- 
came minister of his native parish. He was favorable to the Marrow school 
of divinity, and took part with the Erskines in defending the popular rights 
and in seceding from the Church of Scotland, being one of the four fathers 
of the secession. In 1724, he was made their professor of divinity. He 
1 "Memorials of Alexander Moncrieff and James Fisher," by Dr. Young and 
Dr. Brown. 



Art. xi.] RISE OF THE ABERDEEN BRANCH. 91 

died in 1761. He wrote "An Inquiry into the Principle, Rule, and End of 
Moral Actions, wherein the Scheme of Selfish Love laid down by Mr. 
Archibald Campbell ... is examined, and the received Doctrine vindi- 
cated." To quote the summary supplied by his biographers, he establishes 
the following propositions : " (1) To show that self-love is not, or ought not 
to be, the leading principle of moral virtue ; (2) That self-interest or pleas- 
ure is not the only standard by which we can and should judge of the virtue 
of our own and others' actions, or that actions are not to be called virtuous 
on account of their correspondency to self-interest; (3) That self-love, as 
it exerts itself in the desire of universal, unlimited esteem, ought not to be 
the great remaining motive to virtuous actions," &c. 



XL— RISE OF THE ABERDEEN BRANCH. 

The north-east of Scotland, — embracing Aberdeen, Banff, Mur- 
ray, Mearns, and a large portion of Angus, — though now very 
much amalgamated with the rest of Scotland, had a character 
of its own in the seventeenth century. The people had a large 
Scandinavian element in their composition, had a shrill into- 
nation, and a marked idiom, and a harder aspect (though prob- 
ably with quite as much feeling within) than the people of the 
south and west. When Samuel Johnson lumbered through the 
region in 1773, and visited Lord Monboddo, he found it miser- 
ably bare of trees ; but, had he travelled a century or two 
earlier, he would have had to pass through wide-spread forests. 
These were cut down in the seventeenth century ; and in the 
stead of the deer and wild animals a more industrious people 
substituted sheep and cattle, ranging over high mountains and 
large undulating plains, on which you would have seen patches 
of oats or bear here and there around the clay or turf dwellings 
of the tenants, but few fences or enclosures of any kind, except 
in the immediate neighborhood of the proprietors, whose cas- 
tles and gardens, on the French model, relieved the wildness of 
the scene. On to the eighteenth century the rural population 
consisted of landlords, with rather small farmers absolutely 
dependent on them, and who paid their rent in the service, on 
certain occasions, of men and horses, and in such articles as 
oats, bear, mutton, salmon, geese, poultry, and peats. In these 
regions the peasantry had not been taught to think and act for 
themselves, as they had been in the south-west by the plough- 



92 RISE OF THE ABERDEEN BRANCH. [Art. xi. 

ing up of the soil effected by the great covenanting movement. 
But in some of the towns, particularly in Aberdeen, which was 
looked up to as a capital by a considerably wide district, there 
was not a little refinement, which spread its influence over the 
landlords, the ministers of religion, and the other professional 
men : in particular, there had been in the city named a gifted 
painter, Jameson, a disciple of Rubens ; and a very superior 
printer, Raban, who put in type the works of the Aberdeen doc- 
tors. The two universities, King's and Marischal's, trained and 
sent forth a large body of educated men, some of whom found 
their proper field on the Continent ; while the great body of them 
remaining at home, were the special instruments — as teachers, 
clergymen, doctors, lawyers, or country gentlemen — of spread- 
ing a civilizing influence in these regions. For ten years after 
the Restoration, seventy students entered annually at King's, 
and a considerable number, though not so large, at Marischal : 
some of these rose to eminence, and all of them helped to 
create a taste for learning and an appreciation for it, on the 
southern slope of the Grampians, and in the wide region lying 
north of that range of mountains, which was never crossed 
by the Roman legions, but was. now conquered by the Roman 
literature. 

The Calvinistic and covenanting principles which had deter- 
mined the Scottish character in the south and west, and so far 
north as Fife, Perth, and some parts of Angus, had not gen- 
erally permeated the region beyond. No doubt, the common 
people in the northern counties gladly listened to the evangeli- 
cal preachers from the west, when they had the opportunity ; 
and some of the covenanting ministers, banished in the times 
of persecution from their own people in the south, gathered 
around them in the places of their exile — as Samuel Ruther- 
ford in Aberdeen, David Dickson in Turriff — bodies of 
devoted adherents attached to the Presbyterian preaching and 
organization. Still these were as yet merely fermenting, but 
leavening, centres in the midst of influences which were resist- 
ing their extension. In the wide country held by the Gordon 
family, the Roman Catholic religion still held its sway. In the 
other parts, the landlords, the college regents, and the clergy 
were mostly Cavalier in politics and High Church in religion ; 
and the mass of the people had not learned to claim the pre- 



Art. xi.] PRELACY AND PRESBYTERY. 93 

rogative of thinking and acting for themselves. When a 
deputation from the General Assembly of the Presbyterian 
Church of Scotland — consisting of Alexander Henderson, Sam- 
uel Rutherford, and Andrew Cant — went north to Aberdeen to 
proclaim the Covenant in 1638, they were met by " Replies and 
Duplies " on the part of the Aberdeen doctors, and the land- 
lords discouraged their tenantry from following the new zeal 
imported from the south. The divines of Aberdeen, during 
that century, such as Baron and John Forbes (author of " Ire- 
nicum "), were adherents of Episcopacy ; their studies were in 
the later fathers of the church, and their sympathies with the 
Laudean divines of England ; and like them they wrote 
against Popery on the one hand, and Puritanism on the other. 
It was years after the Revolution before the Presbyterian 
Church could put its legal rights in execution in the north-east 
of Scotland. Almost all the old Presbyterian ministers had 
disappeared ; and, in 1694, the Synod of Aberdeen consisted of 
six clerical members, most of them brought from the south. 
It was not till 1703 that John Willison was settled as first 
Presbyterian minister at Brechin in Angus ; it was not till 
1708 that he was in a position to dispense the sacrament of 
the Lord's Supper. When he intimated that he was to do so 
next Lord's day, Mr. Skinner, the Episcopalian minister who 
preached in the same church in the after part of the day, 
announced that he would dispense the communion on the same 
day in the afternoon to his supporters ; and the ecclesiastical 
records report that 1500 communicated with Mr. Skinner. 
When Mr. Gray was appointed minister of Edzell, in the same 
district, the Presbytery had to conduct the services at his ordi- 
nation in a neighboring parish ; and they then passed into the 
parish to " lay hands on him " and return immediately ; and, on 
the following sabbath when he rode to Edzell for the purpose 
of preaching, the people, hounded on by the landlords, took 
him off his horse, flung him into the West Water, and kept 
him there till he was nearly drowned, " to their eternal dis- 
grace," as he causes it to be written in the parish records. 
During the Rebellion of 171 5 the Presbyterian ministers were 
rabbled from their churches, which were occupied by the non- 
juring clergy praying for the Pretender. A considerable body 
of the students in both the Aberdeen colleges sympathized 



94 RISE OF THE ABERDEEN BRANCH. [Art. xi. 

with the banished king ; and, after the battle of Sheriffmuir, 
several of the professors had to retire in consequence of the 
part which they had taken against the government. It was 
not till after the suppression of the Rebellion of 171 5, — indeed, 
not fully till after the crushing of the chieftain power after 
1745, — that the north-east of Scotland became one with the 
south of Scotland in religion and in national feeling. 
1 In the universities, both under Prelatic and Presbyterian 
domination, the philosophy taught had been to a great extent 
Aristotelian and scholastic. The university commissioners 
appointed, in 1643, a cursus for Aberdeen ; and in it the student 
is required, after taking Greek the first year, to go on the 
second year to the dialectics of Ramus, to Aristotle's catego- 
ries, interpretation, and prior analytics, and in the third year 
to the rest of logics and portions of the ethics of Aristotle, 
&c. In the " Metaphysics " of Robert Baron, who lectured in 
Marischal College in the first half of the seventeenth century, 
he treats of being, unity, and goodness ; enters fully into the 
controversy between the Thomists and Scotists ; gives the divi- 
sions of ens and of cause, and treats of necessity and contin- 
gency, of sameness and diversity, of absolute and relative, of 
whole and parts. In the university library of Aberdeen we 
have theses occupying 121 pages by Andrew Cant, the 
younger, of date 1658 ; in these he shows that he knew the 
Copernican theory of the heavens and Harvey's discovery of 
the circulation of the blood : but the whole discussions are 
conducted in a formal manner ; and he dwells fondly on the 
scholastic logic, in the treatment of which he shows some 
independence of thought. In 1710 there was published a work 
by Thomas Blackwell, who had come from Paisley, in 1700, to 
be minister at Aberdeen in the Presbyterian interest, and who 
was made professor in 171 1, and principal in 1 71 7 : his work is 
entitled " Schema Sacrum, or a Sacred Scheme of Natural and 
Revealed Religion ; " and in it the common orthodox theology 
is defended by the old distinctions, and there are no traces of a 
new spirit or a new school. 

But, after the year 171 5, Aberdeen was prepared for a new 
style of thought. The High Church theology was no longer 
encouraged, except among a scattered nonjuring clergy sub- 
jected to poverty and privation. The Calvinistic divinity had 



Art. xii.] GEORGE TURNBULL. 95 

never struck its roots deep into the soil ; but the literature and 
physical science of England were known to and relished by the 
educated classes, and there must be a fresh philosophy to meet 
the awakened intelligence and new tastes of the country. The 
first to gratify this feeling was a young graduate of Edinburgh, 
appointed as one of the rectors in Marischal by the Crown, 
which had seized the patronage of the college, vacated by the 
attainder of Earl Marischal, who had been out in the rebellion. 



XII. — GEORGE TURNBULL} 

The celebrated Hogarth, in his " Beer Street," has a graphic 
picture of a porter drinking barley wine, after depositing on the 
ground a load, directed to the trunk-maker, of five enormous 
folios ; one of which has on the back, " Turnbull on Ancient 
Paintings." Turnbull was one of the most voluminous writers 
of his age. I have read many thousand pages written by him ; 
but I fear the greater part of the copies of his works have gone 
to the destiny indicated by Hogarth. It is disappointing to 
find that this author, who was both an able and a graceful 
writer, has passed away from the public view so effectively that 
it is difficult now to procure materials for his biography, or even 
to get a sight of most of his works. It may be doubted whether 
any one, except the writer of this history, has been at pains to 
peruse his works as a whole, for the last hundred years. Dugald 
Stewart, so well informed on British philosophy, had only looked 
into one of his volumes ; and Sir William Hamilton, in his mul- 
tifarious researches among obscure writers, does not seem to 
have thought it worth his while making any inquiries about 
him. Yet it can be shown that he exercised a greater influence 
than all other masters and writers put together on his pupil 
Thomas Reid, — the true representative of the Scottish philos- 
ophy. He seems to have been the son of the Rev. George 
Turnbull (his mother's name was Elizabeth Glass), of whom we 

1 Parish records of Alloa in Register Office, Edinburgh ; " Catalogue of Grad- 
uates in Edinburgh," edited by Laing (Bannatyne Club) ; "Presentation Book" 
of Marischal College, Aberdeen. 



96 GEORGE TURNBULL. [Art. xii. 

can gather a few scattered notices : as that he was born about 
1656 ; that he graduated in Edinburgh University in 1675 I that 
he became minister of Alloa in 1689, when the Episcopal cler- 
gyman was ejected ; that he was translated to Tyningham in 
1699 ; that he was nominated but not carried as moderator of 
the General Assembly in 171 1 ; that he preached before that 
body in 171 3 ; that his name appears among the members of 
"The Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge," in 1720; 
and that he died in June, 1 744, at the age of eighty-eight. His son 
was born in 1698 (he was baptized July 15) ; graduated in Edin- 
burgh in April, 1721 ; and in November of the same year he 
was appointed, by a presentation from the Crown, regent of 
Marischal College ; and is taken on trial in philosophy and the 
Greek language, and declares his willingness to sign the Confes- 
sion of Faith. He comes to have among his colleagues Thomas 
Blackwell, son of the principal, admitted regent in 1723, who 
did much to create a taste for Greek in the college, and who is 
still known to antiquarian scholars by his learned but uninter- 
esting works, " Inquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer," 
" Letters concerning Mythology," and " Memoirs of the Court of 
Augustus." In Aberdeen at that time there was — as we have seen 
there was in Glasgow — a principal's party and an opposition 
party ; and there were disputes about the election of the rector. 
The majority of the masters, including Mr. Turnbull, in opposition 
to the principal, Blackwell the elder, wish the society to make 
up a list of persons recommended for the office of rector, to be 
submitted to the procurators chosen by the students in their 
nations ; and, upon the principal refusing, they elect a preses in 
his room, and choose, a rector, who holds a court and summons 
the principal to appear before them ; but they are stayed in 
their career by a suit from " the Lords of Council and Session." 
On April 14, 1726, he has carried a batch of thirty-nine students 
through a course of philosophy on to graduation ; and the last 
name on the list is Thomas Reid. As having to preside on this oc- 
casion, he prepares a thesis, afterwards published, to be discussed 
by the candidates, — " De Pulcherrima Mundi Materialis turn 
Rationalis Constitutione," — in which the new physics are em- 
ployed to furnish proofs of the existence of God, and in which 
he declares that natural science (physiology) is to be taught 
before moral philosophy, and inclines to censure Socrates because 



Art. xii.] HIS WORKS. 97 

he discouraged inquiries into the structure of nature. He also 
printed, when at Aberdeen, a " Thesis on the Connection of 
Natural and Moral Philosophy." In his lectures on pneuma- 
tology he delivered to his students those views which, after 
being rewritten, were given to the world in his treatise on moral 
philosophy. In his later writings he frequently quotes Hutche- 
son and Butler ; but his own philosophic opinions seem to have 
been formed, and delivered in lectures, before either of these 
influential writers had published any of their works. 

In 1726, he published "A Philosophical Inquiry concerning 
the Connection between the Doctrines and Miracles of Jesus 
Christ." In it he treats of subjects in which there is a revived 
interest and which are anxiously discussed in our day, and 
advances principles which would be favorably received by many 
in these times. He argues that the works of Jesus were natural 
proper samples of his doctrines. That he had abandoned the 
old theology of Scotland is evident, from his declaring that the 
Scripture way of talking about the Spirit of God and his opera- 
tions means simply assistance to the virtuous. It is interesting 
to notice, that in this treatise he refers once and again to com- 
mon-sense as settling certain moral questions ; in this, as in other 
matters, anticipating and probably guiding Dr. Reid. 

In the spring of 1727, Turnbull resigned his office in Maris- 
chal College ; and for the next twelve years we have little 
record of him. There is reason to believe that he became a 
travelling tutor, — it is said, to the family of the Wauchopes, of 
Niddry, near Edinburgh. It is certain that he must have trav- 
elled extensively on the Continent, and made himself conver- 
sant with the treasures of art in Italy. In 1732, he received the 
honorary degree of doctor of laws from the University of Edin- 
burgh. He seems to have mingled in the literary circles of 
London, 1 and acquired friends among persons of eminence. 
During these years he prepared an immense store of literary 
works, which were issued in rapid succession, — more rapidly, I 
suspect, than the public were prepared to receive them. In 

1 In the Preface to his "Moral Philosophy," he refers to a certain poet, "uni- 
versally confessed to have shown a most extraordinary genius for descriptive 
poetry in some of his works, and in all of them a heart deeply impregnated with 
the warmest love of virtue and mankind," as likely from friendship to cast his eye 
on that Preface ; from which we may argue that he had contracted a friendship 
with James Thomson. 

7 



98 GEORGE TURNBULL. [Art. xii. 

October, 1 739, he advertises, at four guineas, in sheets, his " Trea- 
tise on Ancient Painting ;" in which he has observations on the 
rise, progress, and decline of that art among the Greeks and 
Romans, comments on the genius of Raphael, Michael Angelo, 
Nicholas Poussin, and others, and illustrates the work with 
engravings of fifty pieces of ancient painting. It will be remem- 
bered that Shaftesbury had " Disquisitions on Taste ;" and we 
shall see most of the Scottish metaphysicians speculate on taste 
and beauty. The work was not of such an original or daring 
character as to recommend it to the genius of Hogarth ; yet it 
seems to have had a considerable roll of subscribers. His 
style is pleasant, and the remarks judicious and highly apprecia- 
tive of the classical painters. In February, 1740, there appeared 
his most important work, and the only one that continues to be 
read, " The Principles of Moral Philosophy." At the close he 
promises, as soon as his health admits, a work on " Christian 
Philosophy," which was actually published before the close of 
the year ; and in it he treats of the Christian doctrines con- 
cerning God, providence, virtue, and a future state, and rec- 
ommends the Word of God because it embraces and illustrates 
such doctrines. He dates October, 1740, a preface and appendix 
to Heineccius's " Methodical System of Universal Law." 1 In 
1742, he published " Observations upon Liberal Education ; " and 
in it he speaks as having long been engaged in the work of 
education. He subscribes himself as Chaplain to the Prince of 
Wales, and dedicates the treatise to the " Right Reverend 
Father in God," Thomas, Lord Bishop of Derry ; in whose esteem, 
he says, " he had long had a share." 2 It appears that before 

1 I cannot find that this work was published till 1763, the date of the copy in 
W. S. Library, Edinburgh. In 1740, he published a translation of " Vertot, 
Three Dissertations." 

2 This was Thomas Rundle (born 1686, died 1743). Strong objections were 
taken to his getting the see of Gloucester, and so he went to Derry, when Thom- 
son writes of him in a poem to the memory of Talbot : — 

" Though from native sunshine driven, 
Driven from your friends, the sunshine of the soul, 
By slanderous zeal and politics' infern, 
Jealous of worth." 
In these times, men were sent to Ireland who would not be tolerated in the 
Church of England. Pope says of him : " Rundle has a heart ; " and Swift : — 
" Rundle a bishop, well he may, 
He's still a Christian more than they." 
He was the author of " Letters to the late Mrs. Barbara Landis," in which he 



Art. xii.] FOLLOWS INDUCTIVE METHOD. 99 

this time he had left the communion of the Presbyterian Church 
of Scotland, and entered into orders in the Episcopal Church 
of England, which was doubtless more congenial to his tastes. 
Through the bishop, to whom he dedicated his work, he was 
appointed Rector of Drumachose, in the diocese of Derry. I 
cannot find that he left any mark behind him in that parish : 
there is no remembrance of him in the popular tradition of the 
district, and no record of him in the diocese. In consequence 
of failing health, he went to the Continent, and died at the 
Hague, Jan. 31, 1748. 1 

Turnbull was the first metaphysician of the Scottish — I be- 
lieve of any — school to announce unambiguously and categor- 
ically that we ought to proceed in the method of induction in 
investigating the human mind. He takes as the motto of his 
" Moral Philosophy" the passage from Newton about the method 
of natural philosophy being applicable to moral subjects, and 
the line of Pope, " Account for moral as for natural things." 
His enunciations on this subject are as clear and decided as 
those of Reid and Stewart in after ages. " If a fact be cer- 
tain, there is no reasoning against it ; but every reasoning, 
however specious it may be, — or rather however subtle and 
confounding, — if it be repugnant to fact, must be sophistical." 
It must have been from Turnbull that Reid learned, even as it 
was from Reid that Stewart learned, to appeal to common lan- 
guage as built on fact or universal feeling. " Language not 
being invented by philosophers, but contrived to express com- 
mon sentiments or what every one perceives, w r e may be 
morally sure that where universally all languages make a dis- 
tinction there is really in nature a difference." Reid only 
catches the spirit of his old master, who speaks of "philoso- 
phers who, seeking the knowledge of human nature not from 
experience, but from I know not what subtle theories of their 
own invention, depart from common language, and therefore are 

speaks in favor of theatres, gives a high place to reason, says a word in behalf of 
Chubb, praises Shaftesbury, though he regrets his opposition to Christianity. 
He says of those who would destroy the foundation of virtue : " That they turn, 
as the elephants did of old, and trample down those that brought them to the 
war." The following has often been uttered since : "Christianity is so amiable 
in itself, that what Plato says of virtue is true of it, that if it is beheld in its 
native charms every man would be in love with it." 
1 See" London Magazine," for that year. - 



IOO GEORGE TURNBULL. [Art. xii. 

not understood by others, and sadly perplex and involve them- 
selves." In some respects, his exposition of the method is more 
comprehensive and correct (so I believe) than that given by 
Reid and Stewart ; inasmuch as he awows distinctly that, having 
got facts and ideas from experience, we may reason deductively 
from them, in what Mr. J. S. Mill calls the deductive method, 
but which is in fact a joint inductive and deductive method. 
He sees clearly that in natural philosophy there is a mixture 
of experiments with reasonings from experiments ; and he as- 
serts that reasonings from experiments may have the same 
relation to moral philosophy that mathematical truths have to 
natural philosophy. " In both cases equally, as soon as certain 
powers or laws of nature are inferred from experience, we may 
consider them, reason about them, and compare them with 
other properties, powers, or laws." He instances among the 
moral ideas which we may compare, and from which we may 
draw deductions, those of intelligence, volition, affection, and 
habit. Moral philosophy is described by him as a mixed sci- 
ence of observations, and reasonings from principles known by 
experience to take place in or to belong to human nature. In 
his preface to Heineccius, he says that the appended " dis- 
course upon the nature and origin of laws is an attempt to 
introduce the experimental way of reasoning into morals, or 
to deduce human duties from internal principles and dispo- 
sitions in the human mind." In following this method, he 
claims to be superior to Puffendorf, to Grotius, and the older 
jurists. 

Proceeding in this method he discovers, both in matter and 
mind, an established order and excellent general laws, and on 
this subject quotes largely from his contemporaries Berkeley 
and Pope. He constantly appeals to these laws as illustrating 
the divine wisdom; and to the excellence of laws as justifying 
the divine procedure, despite certain incidental acts which may 
flow from them. As inquirers discover these laws, science is 
advanced ; and he dwells as fondly on the progressiveness of 
knowledge as Bacon had done and as Stewart has done. 

In particular, he shows that if we look at human nature as 
a whole, and at its several parts, we shall find beneficent gen- 
eral laws. He discovers in our constitution means to moral 
ends, and the science 'of . these means and ends is prop- 



Art. xii.] ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 101 

erly called moral philosophy. He shows that by such a study 
we can discover what are natural laws ; and that, in all 
well-regulated states, the sum and substance of what is called 
its civil laws are really laws of natural and universal obliga- 
tion ; " adding that "civil law adopts only those laws of nature 
on which the quiet of mankind entirely depends, and that 
there are other duties to which men must attend out of rev- 
erence to their Creator and sincere love to mankind, without 
regard to the fear of human penalties." He shows that man- 
kind are not left indifferent to virtue and to beauty : " As 
we are capable of distinguishing truth from falsehood, so we 
are capable of distinguishing good and approvable actions, 
affections, and characters, from bad and disapprovable ones." 
He would call this capacity moral sense, moral taste, moral 
discernment, or moral conscience. Like Shaftesbury (" who 
must live forever in the esteem of all who delight in moral 
inquiries"), and Hutcheson, whom he often approvingly quotes, 
he represents the virtues as capable of being reduced into 
benevolence. 

In unfolding the elements of human nature, he dwells with 
evident fondness on the "association of ideas." He does not 
seem to attempt an ultimate resolution of the laws ; but he con- 
siders association as " a league or cohesion formed by frequent 
conjunction in the mind," and says that "any appearance 
immediately suggests its concomitants and consequents to 
us." He adds, "that association is more easily engendered 
between ideas that have some affinity or likeness." It may 
be doubted whether we have a better account at this day of 
the law of association as a whole. In regard to what Brown 
calls " secondary laws," and Hamilton the " law of preference," 
he prescribes two rules from Cicero for helping the memory : 
one is to attend to the things we would wish to recall ; and 
the other is to consider its analogies, relations, and oppositions 
toother objects which will thus call it up. He accounts (as 
Stewart does) by the association of ideas for the law of habit, 
which he represents as a " propension to do, and a facility and 
readiness in doing, what we have often done." He shows truly 
and ingeniously how association influences the senses, by con- 
necting the qualities perceived by one sense with those per- 
ceived by the others (a subject much dwelt on in a later age 



102 GEORGE TURNBULL. [Art. xii. 

by Brown) ; and, in particular, how, according to the theory of 
Berkeley, it aids the eye in discovering distance, not itself an 
idea of sight. He shows how our ideas have other ideas so as- 
sociated with them that they make one perception, and how 
difficult it is to separate ideas that have thus been asso- 
ciated, and to find out precisely and philosophically what is 
involved in any particular idea, and how apt we are in conse- 
quence to confound qualities that are different. He is par- 
ticularly successful in showing that desires and volitions are 
prompted by associations. " Ideas, as often as they return, 
must excite certain affections ; and the affections which lead 
to action must, as often as they are revived, dispose and excite 
to act, or, in other words, produce will to act." He remarks 
that " very few, if any, of the ideas which excite our warmest 
and keenest affections are quite free from associated parts." 
He insists that " various associations must produce various 
tempers and dispositions of mind ; since every idea, as often 
as it is repeated, must move the affection it naturally tends to 
excite, and ideas with their correspondent affections often 
returning must naturally form inclinations, propensions, and 
tempers." He would account in this way for much of our 
feeling of beauty, and for propensity to imitate passing into 
custom. His exposition of the association of ideas is more 
satisfactory and accurate than the one, so much commended, 
published by Hume at the same time ; and is far more philo- 
sophical than that given by Reid, who, in this respect, fell 
behind his master. I am acquainted with no exposition of 
this part of our constitution published prior to his time which 
seems to me so full and correct. 

His ideas on education are liberal and advanced. He is 
opposed to corporal punishment, and declares that the grand 
aim of education should be to foster good habits. Giving a high 
place to the study of the mind, he maintains, as did all the 
great masters of the Aberdeen school who came after him, 
that mental science should not be taught to young men till 
their minds have been otherwise well furnished. He gives 
logic a somewhat large and wide field ; in this respect, too, like 
the Scottish metaphysicians who came after him. Its province 
is to " examine the power and faculties of our minds (favorite 
phrases of Reid's), their objects, and operations ; to inquire 



Art. xii.] HIS INFLUENCE ON RE ID. 103 

into the foundations, the causes of error, deceit, and false taste ; 
and, for that effect, to compare the several arts and sciences 
with one another, and to observe how each of them may derive 
light and assistance from all the rest. Its business is to give 
a full view of the natural union, connection, and dependence 
of all the sciences." Like Reid, and Stewart after him, he sets 
a high value on the study of " the nature and degrees of moral, 
probable, or historical evidence," and complains that it is left 
out in the logical treatises. The teacher should aim to make 
his pupil look at things, instead of words. At the same time, 
he recommends the study of languages with the study of things ; 
employing language in an enlarged sense, as embracing the 
different methods of expressing, embellishing, or enforcing and 
recommending truth, such as oratory, poetry, design, sculpture, 
and painting. He complains that in education the arts of design 
are quite severed, not only from philosophy, but from classical 
studies. The object contemplated by him in his work on " Paint- 
ing " was to bring these various branches into union : he thinks 
that paintings may teach moral philosophy. The essential 
elements of painting are represented by him as being truth, 
beauty, unity, greatness, and grace, in composition. He dwells 
fondly on the analogy between the sense of beauty and moral 
sense ; and on the inseparable connection between beauty and 
truth. His works on " education " and on the fine arts are clear 
and judicious, written in a pleasant and equable, but at the 
same time a commonplace style ; and they seem never to have 
attracted the attention which they deserved, and which would 
have been freely given to works of greater pretension, eccen- 
tricity, or extravagance. 

But, after all, we are most interested in noticing the points 
in which Turnbull seems to have influenced Reid. We have 
already had some of these before us. We have seen that Turn- 
bull announces as clearly as Reid that the human mind is to be 
studied by careful observation. Both are averse to abstruse scho- 
lastic distinctions and recondite ratiocinations on moral subjects. 
Turnbull ever appeals, as Reid did after him, to consciousness 
as the instrument of observation. Both are fond of designat- 
ing mental attributes by the terms "powers" and "faculties." 
Both would give a wide, and I may add a loose, field to logic, 
and include in it the inquiry into the nature of probable evi- 



104 GEORGE TURNBULL. [Art. xn. 

dence. In proceeding in the way of observation, both discover 
natural laws or principles, and both call them by the name of 
" common-sense." " Common-sense is certainly sufficient to 
teach those who think of the matter with tolerable seriousness 
and attention, all the duties and offices of human life ; all our 
obligations to God and our fellow-creatures ; all that is morally 
fit and binding. And there is no need of words to prove that 
to be morally fit and obligatory, which common-sense and rea- 
son clearly show to be so." Reid holds that all active power 
implies mind. This was the expressed doctrine of Turnbull 
before him. " It is, therefore, will alone that produces both 
power and productive energy." " To speak of any other activ- 
ity and power, is to speak without any meaning at all ; because 
experience, the only source of all our ideas (and of the mate- 
rials of our knowledge), does not lead us to any other concep- 
tion or idea of power." Nor should it be omitted that .both — in 
this respect, however, like all the other Scotch metaphysicians — 
ever speak with profound reverence of Scripture ; ever, however, 
dwelling most fondly on those doctrines of the word which are 
also truths of natural religion ; such as the existence of God, the 
obligations of morality, and the immortality of the soul. 

I have been at pains to trace these agreements, not with the 
view of depreciating the originality and still less the indepen- 
dence of Reid, who may have had some of these views sug- 
gested to him by his teacher, but who may have afterwards 
found them in other writers, and who no doubt thought them 
all for himself, and adopted them because they seemed to him 
to be sound. 1 We have seen that in one or two points, Reid 
fell behind his master, who had clearer apprehensions than his 
pupil of mingling deductive with inductive observation, and 
of the laws of the association of ideas. But in other and more 
important philosophic doctrines, Reid passed far beyond his 
teacher. Reid claims to be original in rejecting the ideal the- 
ory of sense perception ; which had been the received one for 
two thousand years, which had been adopted by Locke, and 
pursued to its logical consequences by Berkeley. But Turn- 
bull evidently adheres to the old view. " Properly speaking, what 
we call matter and space are but certain orders of sensible 

1 It does seem rather strange that Reid should nowhere have acknowledged 
what he owed to Turnbull. 



Art. xii.] REID IN ADVANCE OF IIIM. 105 

ideas produced in us, according to established rules of nature, 
by some external cause ; for when we speak of material effects 
and of space, we only mean, and can indeed only mean, certain 
sensible perceptions excited in our mind according to a certain 
order, which are experienced to be absolutely inert and passive, 
and to have no productive force." He speaks of the " external 
material world " as unperceived by us, and in itself absolutely 
unperceivable, as all philosophers acknowledge." When, in 
speaking of the material world, he says it may be called the 
" external cause or occasion of those sensible ideas, and their 
connections, which make to each of us what we call the sensi- 
ble world," we see that this is the doctrine which Reid set 
aside ; and yet we may notice that the phrase " occasion " is 
used by Turnbull, as by Reid, to designate the relation of the 
external action to the internal perception. In another point, 
Reid made a more important advance upon Turnbull. Living 
at a later age, Reid had to meet the objections of the great 
modern revolutionist, and had in consequence to dive down 
into profounder depths of the human constitution. The scep- 
ticism of Hume brought out to view the superficialities of the 
philosophy of Shaftesbury, partly by following its principles to 
their legitimate consequences, but mainly by making all men 
feel that it is nothing wherewith to meet the assaults of the 
new and formidable enemy. Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Turn- 
bull had all appealed to common-sense ; but Reid behoved to 
take a deeper and more searching view of the principles w T hich 
constitute common-sense, in order to meet the exigencies of 
the new era. 

Turnbull' s works had no great circulation in their own day, 
and they speedily disappeared from public view. It might have 
been different had he continued in Aberdeen, and gathered 
around him a body of young men ready to receive and to prop- 
agate the lessons he taught them. But he departed into other 
fields, — into the literary circle of England, and a church which 
set more value on liturgy than on abstract doctrine, — and there 
he met with few to appreciate his gifts. A Presbyterian Scot 
might have urged, with some plausibility, that his name has 
perished because he forsook the country and the church in 
which his philosophic labors would have been valued. It 
might even have been different, had he published his meta- 



106 DAVID FORDYCE. [Art. xm. 

physical treatises a dozen of years earlier ; for then they might 
have run their course with those of Hutcheson and Butler. 
But at the very time that Turnbull advertised his work on 
" Moral Philosophy," Hume published his " Treatise of Human 
Nature," which, as it forced its way to the front, required phi- 
losophy to deepen its foundations and give a new facing to its 
buttresses. Turnbull is remembered because he had, for three 
years, when he was himself a very young man, a diligent and 
thoughtful pupil, who in due time wrestled with the great scep- 
tic, and is acknowledged by Scotland as the representative of 
its native philosophy. 



XIII.— DAVID FORDYCE. 1 

He was born in Aberdeen in 171 1, entered Marischal College in 1742, and 
was drowned at sea, as he was returning from travel, in September, 1751. 
During that age and the next there was a strong disposition towards the 
study of mental philosophy. In 1748, R. Dodsley began the publication of 
the " Preceptor," in London, and Fordyce wrote the article on " Moral Phi- 
losophy." He was appointed professor of moral philosophy in the college 
in which he had been educated, in 1742. In 1745, he published "Dialogues 
concerning Education," a very pleasantly written book. He discusses the 
question whether nature or training does most, and inquires whether the 
Socratic method is fitted to bring forth what is in our nature. He dwells 
fondly, like most of the philosophers of the Scottish school, on the influ- 
ence of the association of ideas. The religion he recommends was evi- 
dently the moderate type : " As the religion of Christ was designed as a 
plain, consistent rule of life, and nof a system of abstracted reasonings and 
speculations, — to influence the heart more than fill the head, — I would en- 
deavor above all things a high spirit of disinterested and extensive virtue." 
He was author also of an essay on " Action of the Pulpit." After his 
death there was published a work of his, " Theodoras, a Dialogue concern- 
ing the Ait of Preaching," to which was added " A discourse on the Elo- 
quence of the Pulpit, by James Fordyce." His " Elements of Moral 
Philosophy" was published in 1754. There is little that is original in his 
works, but much that is judicious and useful. It is evident that he was 
acquainted with the works of Butler and Hutcheson. " Moral philosophy 
contemplates human nature, its moral powers and connections, and deduces 
the laws of action." " Moral philosophy has this in common with natural 

^'Preceptor," vol. ii., 1748; Darling's "Cyclopaedia;" Mackie's "Index 
Funererius ;" Kennedy's "Annals of Aberdeen." 



Art. xv.] JOHN STEVENSON. 1 07 

philosophy that it appeals to nature or to fact." He finds passions or 
affections, some private, some public, and above these; (1) reason or reflec- 
tion ; (2) conscience, by which we denominate some actions and principles 
of conduct honest and good, and others wrong, dishonest, or ill." " We 
came by the idea of moral obligation or duty in the same way as our other 
original and primary perceptions : we receive them from the Author of our 
nature." We employ reason in moral cases, in "examining the condition, 
relations, and other circumstances of the agent, and patient." " Therefore, 
when we use these terms, obligation, duty, ought, and the like, they stand 
for a simple idea." He opposes those who establish morals on the divine 
will, and those who place it in the natures and reasons, truths and fitnesses, 
of things." 



XIV. — WILLIAM DUNCAN} 

He was born in Aberdeen, July, 17 17, and was the son of a respectable 
tradesman. He received his education partly at Aberdeen and partly at 
Foveran. He entered Marischal College in 1733, and took his degree in 
1737. Originally, he was designed for the gospel ministry ; but not rinding 
an inclination for the work, he went, as so many Scottish youths have done 
in like circumstances, to London (in 1739), an d devoted himself to literature ; 
translating " Select Orations of Cicero " and " Caesar's Commentaries," 
which were long found useful by youths averse to turn over the leaves of a 
dictionary He wrote for Dodsley's " Preceptor" the article on " Logic ; " 
and this was afterwards published in a separate volume, and continued for 
an age or two to furnish, not very philosophical but very useful, instruction 
to Scottish and other youths. The work is partly psychological partly 
logical. In Book First he treats of the origin and division of ideas, and of 
language ; in the Second, of judgment, self-evident and demonstrable ; in 
the Third, of reasoning and demonstration ; and in the Fourth, of inven- 
tion, science, and the parts of knowledge. He was appointed professor of 
philosophy in Marischal College, May 18, 1752, and entered the professor- 
ship, Aug. 21, 1753. He was drowned when bathing, May, 1760. 



XV. — JOHN STEVENSON? 

From the date at which we have now arrived, we have a succession of 
distinguished men testifying to the benefit they received from the instruc- 
tion imparted in the departments of logic and moral philosophy in the 
Scotch colleges. As being among the eminently successful teachers of his 
age, we have to give a place to John Stevenson, professor of Logic or 

1 "Scottish Register," January, February, March, 1794. 

2 "Scot's Magazine," August, 1S41 ; Somerville's "Life and Times." 



108 JOHN STEVENSON. [Art. xv. 

"Rational and Instrumental philosophy" in the University of Edinburgh. 
Dugald Stewart says of him that to his " valuable prelections, particularly 
to his illustrations of Aristotle's " Poetics, 1 ' and of Longinus on the " Sub- 
lime," Dr. Robertson has been often heard to say, that he considered him- 
self as more deeply indebted than to any other circumstance in his academic 
studies." " I derived," says Dr. Somerville, "more substantial benefit from 
these exercises and lectures than from all the public classes I attended at 
the university." Similar testimony is borne by the famous leader of the 
evangelical party in the Church of Scotland, Dr. Erskine (see Life by Sir 
Henry W. Moncreiff). The course of instruction followed by Stevenson is 
given in the Scots Magazine, and is well worthy of being quoted as an 
exhibition of the highest style of education imparted in the age. He gives 
lectures upon " Heineccii Elementa Philosophise Rationalis," and Wynne's 
abridgment of Locke's " Essay upon the Human Understanding : " in which 
he explains all the different forms of reasoning, the nature of certainty both 
mathematical and moral, with the different degrees of probability ; and shows 
how the understanding is to be conducted in our inquiries after truth of all 
kinds. He likewise explains the fundamental rules to be observed in the 
interpretation of the texts of very ancient authors. He teaches metaphys- 
ics in lectures upon De Vries's " Ontologia," in which he explains the several 
terms and distinctions which frequently occur in the writings of the learned. 
He also lectures upon Longinus, nepl vipovg, in which he illustrates the 
several precepts of oratory given by Cicero and Quintilian ; and also, upon 
Aristotle, nepl noirjTuajt;, in which he illustrates his rules by examples from 
ancient and modern poets, and explains the grounds of criticism in elo- 
quence and poetry. He gives likewise a course upon " Heineccii Historia 
Philosophica," in which he gives an account of the most famous philoso- 
phers ancient and modern, and the several opinions by which the different 
sects were distinguished. Each of his students is required to make a 
discourse upon a subject assigned him, and to impugn and defend a thesis, 
for his improvement in the art of reasoning. These exercises are per- 
formed before the principal and some of the professors with open doors. 
The students met him two hours daily ; one of them was devoted to lectures 
on logic, delivered in the Latin tongue. It is stated that the college 
opens about the loth of October, and rises about the end of May. The 
shortening of the length of the session in the colleges of Scotland, in later 
years, has done much to lower the standard of attainment. 

John Stevenson was appointed professor in Edinburgh, in 1730, and died 
Sept. T2th, 1775, m ^e eighty-first year of his age. It is mentioned to his 
credit, by Stewart, that at the age of seventy he gave a candid reception to 
the philosophy of Reid, which was subversive of the theories which he had 
taught for forty years ; and that "his zeal for the advancement of knowledge 
prompted him, when his career was almost finished, to undertake the labori- 
ous task of new-modelling that useful compilation of elementary instruc- 
tion to which a singular diffidence of his powers limited his literary 
exertions." (Stewart's " Life and Writings of Reid.") 



Art. xvii.] THOMAS BOSTON. 109 



XVI. — SIR JOHN PRINGLE} 

He was for a time "professor of pneumatology and ethical philosophy" in 
Edinburgh University. The pneumatics are divided into the following parts : 

1. A physical inquiry into the nature of such subtle and material substances 
as are imperceptible to the senses, and known only from their operations ; 

2. The nature of immaterial substances connected with matter, in which 
is demonstrated, by natural evidence, the immortality of the human soul ; 

3. The nature of immaterial created beings not connected with matter ; 

4. Natural theology, or the existence and attributes of God demonstrated from 
the light of nature. Ethics or moral philosophy is divided into the theo- 
retical and practical parts, in treating of which the authors he chiefly uses 
are Cicero, Marcus Antoninus, Puffendorf, and Lord Bacon. He had 
lectures explaining the origin and principles of civil government, illustrated 
with an account of the rise and fall of the ancient governments of Greece 
and Rome, and a view of that form of government which took its rise 
from the irruptions of the northern nations. His students have also dis- 
courses presented to them upon some important heads of pneumatical or 
moral philosophy, which are delivered before the principal with open doors. 
Pringle was by no means so thorough an instructor as Stevenson. Carlyle 
describes him "as an agreeable lecturer, though no great master of the sci- 
ence he taught." " His lectures were chiefly a compilation from Lord 
Bacon's works, and had it not been for Puffendorf s small book, which he 
made his text, we should not have been instructed in the rudiments of the 
science." Nevertheless, we see that he discussed topics which must issue, 
sooner or later, in a scientific jurisprudence and political economy. We 
see, in the case both of Stevenson and Pringle, how much attention was 
paid in the Scottish universities to the practice of English composition. 

Pringle's taste did not lie specially in metaphysics. He was born in 
Roxburghshire, in 1707, and became a physician. He settled in Edinburgh 
about 1734 ; and after 1748, resided in London, where he was elected presi- 
dent of the Royal Society in 1773. He died in 1782. 



XVII. — THOMAS BOSTON. 

We wish our readers to transport themselves to the eastern border country 
of Scotland, and to try to realize its condition in the first half of last century. 
People are apt to take their views of that district from Sir Walter Scott, 
who passed the most interesting portion of his boyhood there, and picking 
up the dim traditions of the past ere they were finally lost, and tingeing them 
with the romantic hues of his own imagination, has presented to us such a 
picture as a man of the nineteenth century, in love with chivalry, would be 

1 "Scot's Magazine," 1747, 1749; Chambers's "Biographical Dictionary.'" 



1 10 THOMAS BOSTON. [Art. xvn. 

likely to furnish of the ages of border strife. But the truth is, Sir Walter 
has given us only one side of the Scottish character ; he never thoroughly 
sympathized with the more earnest features of the national mind, and he 
did not appreciate the attempts which were made in the seventeenth cen- 
tury to deliver the country from violence and superstition, and to promote 
education and a scriptural religion. The people of the eighteenth century 
had such traditions of the earlier ages as to be glad that the days of the 
border raids had passed away. At the time we wish to sketch, two classes 
of people were to be found in the district. There were landed proprietors, 
disposed to allow no opposition to their not very generous or enlightened 
will, but who were already catching the taste for improving the land, which 
has made Berwickshire one of the most advanced agricultural districts in 
the three kingdoms. Under them were small farmers and their servants, 
with the ignorance and much of the rudeness of the previous ages, and not 
yet awakened to independent thought and action. Between them there 
was scarcely any middle class, except the parish ministers, who, in the 
early part of the century, if not highly cultivated, were zealous preachers 
of the doctrines of grace, and actively seeking to raise their people to 
church-going habits and a decent morality ; and who, at a later date, as 
patrons began to assert their legal rights, and colleges adopted the new 
philosophy, became the most vehement opponents of the evangelical party : 
so that, in the days of Carlyle, the Synod of Merse and Teviotdale turned 
the vote against popular rights, and the ministers of it, coming to the Gen- 
eral Assembly, rushed to the theatre to hear Mrs. Siddons when she hap- 
pened to be in Edinburgh. Believing that there was nothing suited to them 
in such a religion, the common people set up in the towns and large vil- 
lages seceding congregations, which drew towards them the more earnest 
of the inhabitants. Out of one of these congregations sprang Thomas 
M'Crie, who has given us the other phase of the Scottish character. 

At the beginning of the century, the most remarkable man in the district 
was undoubtedly Thomas Boston. Born at Dunse in the previous century, 
he remembered his going, when a boy, to the prison of his native place to 
keep his father company when he was incarcerated for resisting the imposi- 
tion of Prelacy. All his life he is most sedulous and consistent in discounte- 
nancing the system of church patronage, which is being steadily introduced. 
Settled as a minister first in Simprin, and then in Ettrick, he is consumingly 
earnest in visiting once a year, in catechising twice a year, and in preach- 
ing on Sabbath-day and week-day to, an ignorant and careless people just 
rising out of barbarism. But he contrived to retain a literary taste amidst 
his active parochial employments. With a difficulty in getting books, and 
rejoicing so when a good one came in his way, he was able, by his own 
independent study, to develop views in regard to the importance of Hebrew 
points which were far in advance of those attained in his time by any Brit- 
ish scholar. Endowed with a clear, logical mind, he has, in his " Fourfold 
State " and " Covenant of Grace," given us perhaps the best exposition we 
have of the old Scotch theology in its excellencies, — some would add, in its 
exclusiveness. Living and breathing in the doctrine of free grace, he seized 
with avidity and valued excessively the " Marrow of Modern Divinity," 



Art. xviii.] DA VID DUDGEON. 1 1 1 

which he found in the cottage of one of his people, and he vigorously 
opposed the moral or legal preaching which was fast coming in with the 
new literature and philosophy. Singularly single-minded, earnest, and fer- 
vent in his piety, this man becomes a favorite and a power, first in his dis- 
trict, and, in the end, by his theological works all over Scotland. In 
reading his Memoirs, we observe that he was painfully careful in watching 
his moods of mind, often referring to spiritual interposition what arose from 
wretched health ; and that he was ever looking on events occurring in 
God's providence as signs indicating that he should pursue a particular 
line of conduct. It needed a philosophy — we regret that it should have 
been an infidel one which did the work — to correct these errors of a nar- 
row theology. 1 



XVIII. — DA VID DUDGEON. 

Already the old orthodoxy was being troubled. Mr. David Dudgeon 
published, in 1732, a work entitled "The Moral World." We have no 
record of the early history of this man, and we do not know whether he 
received a college education. When he comes under our notice, he is 
tenant of a large farm called Lennel Hill, in the parish of Coldstream. 
In the work referred to he maintains, with clearness and ability, a doctrine 
like that of Anthony Collins, whom he had read. He asserts " that there 
is no evil in the moral world but what necessarily ariseth from the nature 
of imperfect creatures, who always pursue their good, but cannot but be 
liable to error or mistake," and "that evil or sin is inseparable in some 
degree from all created beings, and most consistent with the designs of a 
perfect Creator." On account of the errors in this work, he was summoned 
before the Presbytery, where two charges are brought against him: 1st, 
That he denies and destroys all distinction and difference between moral 
good and evil, or else makes God the author of evil, and refers all evil to 
the imperfection of creatures ; 2d, That he denies the punishment of another 
life, or that God punishes men for sin in this life, — yea, that man is account- 
able. He appears before ^the court, and holds it to be contrary to Scripture 
that man has free-will in the Arminian sense, but holds that man is account- 
able and punishable for practising contrary to the divine precepts of our 
Saviour, the practice of which tends to make all men happy. The case 
goes up from presbytery to synod, and from synod to General Assembly, 
which remits it to the Commission of Assembly in 1733, again in 1734, again 
in 1735, and again in 1736, with no evidence that the commission ever vent- 

1 The representative book of the age then passing away was " Natural Relig- 
ion Insufficient, and Revealed Necessary to Man's Happiness in his Present 
State " by the late Rev. Thomas Halyburton, professor of divinity in the Univer- 
sity of St. Andrews (born 1674, died 17 12). It is a clearly written, respectably 
learned work, and establishes its point. It was superseded by the deeper discus- 
sions raised by Hume. (" Life and Writings," by Burns.) 



112 DAVID DUDGEON. [Art. xvm. 

ured to take it up. 1 In 1734, he published a vindication of the "Moral 
World," in reply to a pamphlet against him, said to be written by Andrew 
Baxter ; and therein he maintains that when a rogue is hanged he is set free 
to enter a state where he may be reformed. His most important work is 
"Philosophical Letters concerning the Being and Attributes of God," first 
printed in 1737. These letters were written, in the midst of pressing agri- 
cultural cares, to the Rev. Mr. Jackson, author of a work written in the 
spirit of Clarke, " The Existence and Unity of God." In these letters, 
Dudgeon reaches a species of refined Spinozism, mingled with Berkeleyan- 
ism. He denies the distinction of substances into spiritual and material, 
maintains that there is no substance distinct from God, and that " all our 
knowledge but of. God is about ideas ; they exist only in the mind, and 
their essence and modes consist only in their being perceived." In 1739, ne 
published a " Catechism founded upon Experience and Reason, collected 
by a Father for the use of his Children ; " and, in an introductory letter, he 
wishes that natural religion alone was embraced by all men, and states that, 
though he believes there was an extraordinary man sent into our world 
seventeen hundred years ago to instruct mankind, yet he doubts whether he 
"ever commanded any of those things to be written concerning him which 
we have." The same year, he published " A View of the Necessitarian or 
Best Scheme, freed from the Objections of M. Crousaz, in his Examination 
of Pope's ' Essay on Man.' " 

Dudgeon died at Upsettlington, on the borders of England, January, 
1743, at the age of thirty-seven. His works were published in a combined 
form in 1765, in a volume without a printer's name attached, showing that 
there was not as yet thorough freedom of thought in Scotland. His writ- 
ings had for a time a name in the district (the " Catechism " reached a 
third edition), but afterwards passed away completely from public notice. 
The late Principal Lee was most anxious to know more of his history, and 
in particular whether he could have influenced David Hume in personal 
intercourse or by his writings. As they lived in the same district, Hume 
must have heard of the case, which appeared when Hume was cogitating his 
own system. There are points in which Dudgeon anticipated Hume. Thus, 
Dudgeon maintains that all knowledge is about ideas, the essence of which 
is that they are perceived. He says that the words "just, unjust, desert, 
&c, are necessarily relative to society ; " and that if we allow that there is 
not justice in the government of this world, we cannot argue that there is 
justice in the world to come. Dudgeon, too, is a stern necessarian. But 
in all these points Dudgeon had himself been anticipated by others. In 
other respects the two widely differ. Dudgeon assumes throughout a 
much higher moral'tone than Hume ever did.. Dudgeon had evidently 
abandoned a belief in Christianity, but he stood up resolutely for a 
rational demonstration of the existence of God as the cause of the ideas 
which come under our experience ; and he has a whole system of natural 
religion : whereas Hume undermines all religion, natural as well as revealed. 

1 The author of this work has been aided in his researches on this subject by 
the great kindness of the Rev. Alexander Christison, clerk to the Presbytery of 
C him side. 



Art. xix.] DAVID HUME. 1 13 

Dudgeon had superior philosophic abilities ; and in other circumstances 
might have had a Chance of becoming the head of a new philosophic 
heresy. But there was a young man in his own neighborhood being trained 
to supersede and eclipse him in his own line, and to go beyond deism to 
atheism. It is thus that error advances till it corrects itself. 



XIX.— DAVID HUME} 

David Hume was born at Edinburgh, on April 26, 171 1. He 
was the second son of Joseph Home or Hume, of Ninewells, 
so called from a number of springs which may still be seen as 
fresh as when the name was given. The mansion is in the 
parish of Chirnside, in Berwickshire, and is situated on the 
green slope of a hill which rises from the river Whitadder, 
immediately in front. The situation is remarkably pleasant, 
and from the heights above there are extensive views of the 
whole eastern border country, now associated in the minds of 
all reading people with tales of romance. Here David Hume 
passed the greater portion of his younger years, and much of 
the quieter and more studious parts of his middle age. But 
he never refers to the scenes of his native place, not even 
(as Mr. Burton has remarked) when he has occasion in his 
" History of England " to relate events which might have led 
him to do so. It is clear that his taste for the beauties of 
nature was never very keen ; the time had not come when all 
people rave about natural scenery ; he was in no way disposed 
to expose himself to English prejudice by betraying Scottish 
predilections, and I rather think that he was glad that the 
time of border raids had for ever passed away. 

His father was a member of the Faculty of Advocates, but 
passed his life as a country gentleman. His mother was a 
daughter of Sir D. Falconer of Newton, who had been a law- 
yer in the times of the Stuarts, and had filled the office of 
president of the Court of Session from 1682 to 1685. So far 
as the youth was exposed to hereditary predilections, they were 
those of Scotch landlords, who ruled supreme in their own 
estates, of hard-headed Edinburgh lawyers, and of old families 

1 "My own Life," by David Hume; "Life and Correspondence of David 
Hume," by John Hill Burton, &c. 



114 DAVID HUME. [Art. xix. 

opposed to the great Whig or covenanting struggle of the 
previous century. His father having died when the second 
son was yet an infant, the education of the children devolved 
on their mother, who is represented as training them with 
great care, — in what way or form in respect of religion we 
are not told. 

David became an entrant of the class of William Scott, pro- 
fessor of Greek in the Edinburgh University, February 27, 
1723, being still under twelve years of age. What his precise 
college course was is not recorded ; but we know generally 
that in those times, and for many years after, boys who should 
have been at school, after getting an imperfect acquaintance 
with Latin and Greek, were introduced in the classes of logic, 
pneumatics, and moral philosophy, to subjects fitted only for 
men of mature powers and enlarged knowledge. I suspect 
there was no ruling mind among his teachers to sway him, and 
he was left to follow the bent of his own mind. Already he 
has a taste for literature, and a tendency to speculative philoso- 
phy. " I was seized very early," he says in " My Own Life," 
" with a passion for literature, which has been the ruling pas- 
sion of my life, and a great source of my enjoyments." In 
writing to a friend, July 4, 1727, he mentions having by him 
written papers which he will not make known till he has pol- 
ished them, and these evidently contain the germs of a system 
of mental philosophy. " All the progress I have made is but 
drawing the outlines on loose bits of paper : here a hint of a 
passion ; there a phenomenon in the mind accounted for ; in 
another an alteration of these accounts." Mr. Burton pub- 
lishes part of a paper of his early years, being " An Historical 
Essay on Chivalry and Modern Honor." In it we have no 
appreciation of chivalry, but we have the germs of the historical, 
political, and ethical speculations which he afterwards devel- 
oped. He inquires why courage is the principal virtue of 
barbarous nations, and why chastity is the point of honor with 
women (always a favorite topic with him), and is evidently in 
the direction of his utilitarian theory of virtue. About his 
seventeenth year he began, but speedily relinquished, the study 
of the law. " My studious disposition, my sobriety, and my in- 
dustry, gave my family a notion that the law was a proper 
profession for me ; but I found an unsurmountable aversion 



Art. xix.] LETTER TO A PHYSICIAN. 1 15 

to every thing but the pursuits of philosophy and general 
learning ; and while they fancied I was poring upon Voet and 
Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the authors I was secretly 
devouring." 

We have two admirable accounts of Hume's life : the one, 
" My Own Life," calm as philosophy itself ; the other by Mr. 
Hill Burton, who had access to the papers collected by Baron 
Hume, and deposited with the Royal Society of Edinburgh ; 
and who has collected all other available information, and put 
it together in a clear and systematic manner. But there is 
much that we should like to know not communicated. The 
autobiography, though honest enough, is not open or communi- 
cative. We may rest assured that in that great lake which 
spreads itself so calmly before us, there were depths, and 
movements in these depths, which have been kept from our 
view. Though so skilled in psychological analysis, he gives no 
account of the steps by which he was led to that deadly scep- 
ticism in philosophy and theology which he held by so firmly, 
and propounded so perseveringly. Mr. Burton has, however, 
published a remarkable document, which lets us see what we 
should never have learned from " My Own Life," that there 
had been an awful struggle and a crisis. 

It is a letter written to a physician with great care, but 
possibly never sent. He begins with stating that he "had 
always a strong inclination to books and letters," and that, 
after fifteen years, he had been left to his own choice in read- 
ing: " I found it to incline almost equally to books of reasoning 
and philosophy, and to poetry and the polite authors. Every 
one who is acquainted either with the philosophers or critics, 
knows that there is nothing yet established in either of these 
sciences, and that they contain little more than endless dis- 
putes, even in the most fundamental articles. L T pon examina- 
tion of these, I found a certain boldness of temper growing in 
me, which was not inclined to submit to any authority on these 
subjects, but led me to seek out some new medium by which 
truth might be established. After much study and reflection 
on this, at last, when I was about eighteen years of age, there 
seemed to be opened up to me a new source of thought, which 
transported me beyond measure, and made me, with an ardor 
natural to young men, throw up every other pleasure or busi- 



Ii6 DAVID HUME. [Art. xix. 

ness to apply actively to it. The law, which was the business 
I designed to follow, appeared nauseous to me ; and I could 
think of no other way of pushing my fortune in the world 
but that of scholar and philosopher. I was infinitely happy in 
this course of life for some months, till at last, about the be- 
ginning of September, 1729, all my ardor seemed in a moment 
to be extinguished, and I could no longer raise my mind to that 
pitch which formerly gave me such excessive pleasure. I felt 
no uneasiness or want of spirits when I laid aside my book ; 
and therefore never imagined there was any bodily distemper 
in the case, but that my coldness proceeded from a laziness of 
temper which must be overcome by redoubling my application. 
In this condition I remained for nine months, very uneasy to 
myself, but without growing any worse, which was a miracle. 
There was another particular which contributed more than any 
thing to waste my spirits, and bring on me this distemper, 
which was, that, having read many books of morality, — such as 
Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch, — and being smit with their beau- 
tiful representations of virtue and philosophy, I undertook the 
improvement of my temper and will, along with my reason and 
understanding. I was continually fortifying myself with re- 
flections against death and poverty and shame and pain, and 
all the other calamities of life. These no doubt are exceeding 
useful when joined with an active life, because the occasion 
being presented, along with the reflection, works it into the 
soul, and makes it take a deep impression ; but in solitude they 
serve to little other purpose than to waste the spirits, the force 
of the mind meeting with no resistance, but wasting itself in the 
air, like our arm when it misses the aim. This, however, I did 
not learn but by experience, and till I had already ruined my 
health, though I was not sensible of it." He then describes 
the symptoms : scurvy spots breaking out on his fingers the 
first winter, then a wateriness in the mouth. Next year, about 
May, 1 73 1, there grew upon him a ravenous appetite, and a pal- 
pitation of heart. In six weeks, from " being tall, lean, and 
rawboned, he became on a sudden the most sturdy, robust, 
healthful-like fellow you have seen, with a ruddy complexion 
and a cheerful countenance." He goes on to say, that " having 
now time and leisure to cool my inflamed imagination, I began 
to consider seriously how I should proceed with my philosoph- 



Art. xix.] HIS YOUTHFUL EXPERIENCE. 1 17 

ical studies. I found that the moral philosophy transmitted to 
us by antiquity labored under the same inconvenience that has 
been found in their natural philosophy, of being entirely hypo- 
thetical, and depending more upon invention than experience ; 
every one consulted his fancy in erecting schemes of virtue 
and happiness, without regarding human nature, upon which 
every moral conclusion must depend. This, therefore, I re- 
solved to make my principal study, and the source from which 
I would derive every truth in criticism as well as morality." 
He tells how he had read most of the celebrated books in 
Latin, French, and English ; how " within these three years I 
find I have scribbled many a quire of paper, in which there is 
nothing contained but my own inventions ; " how he " had col- 
lected the rude materials for many volumes ; " but he adds, " I 
had no hopes of delivering my opinions with such elegance and 
neatness as to draw to me the attention of the world, and I 
would rather live and die in obscurity than produce them 
maimed and imperfect." " It is a weakness rather than low- 
ness of spirits which troubles me ; " and he traces an analogy 
between what he had passed through and recorded religious 
experiences. " I have noticed in the writings of the French 
mystics, and in those of our fanatics here, that when they 
give a history of the situation of their souls, they mention a 
coldness and desertion of the spirit, which frequently returns." 
But, " however this may be, I have not come out of the cloud 
so well as they commonly tell us they have done, or rather 
began to despair of ever recovering. To keep myself from 
being melancholy on so dismal a prospect, my only security 
was in peevish reflections on the vanity of the world, and of all 
human glory, which, however just sentiments they may be es- 
teemed, I have found can never be sincere, except in those who 
are possessed of them. Being sensible that all my philosophy 
would never make me contented in my present situation, I be- 
gan to rouse up myself." He found these two things very bad 
for this distemper, study and idleness, and so he wishes to be- 
take himself to active life. His choice was confined to two 
kinds of life, that of a travelling governor, and that of a mer- 
chant. The first not being fit for him he says he is now on his 
way to Bristol, to engage in business till he is able to "leave 
this distemper behind me." He says, that " all the physicians 



1 1 8 DA VID HUME. [Art. xix. 

I have consulted, though very able, could never enter into my 
distemper," and so he now applies to this eminent doctor. 

In this remarkable document Hume unbosoms himself for 
the first time, and, I may add, for the last time. He had 
endeavored to act the self-righteous and self-sufficient stoic. 
We have other evidence of this. In the letter already ex- 
tracted from, written when he was sixteen, he says, " I hate 
task-reading, and I diversify them at pleasure ; sometimes a 
philosopher, sometimes a poet." " The philosopher's wise 
man and the poet's husbandman agree in peace of mind in a 
liberty and independence on fortune, and contempt of riches, 
power, and glory. Every thing is placid and quiet in both, 
nothing perturbed or in disorder." " A perfectly wise man that 
outbraves fortune is surely greater than the husbandman who 
slips by her ; and indeed this pastoral and Saturnian happiness 
I have in a great measure come at just now. I live a king, 
pretty much by myself, neither full of action nor perturbation, 
— molles somnos. This state, however, I can foresee, is not to 
be relied on. My peace of mind is not sufficiently confirmed 
by philosophy to withstand the blows of fortune. This great- 
ness and elevation of soul is to be found only in study and con- 
templation ; this can alone teach us to look down on human 
accidents. You must allow me to talk thus like a philosopher ; 
'tis a subject I think much on, and could talk all day long of." 
But the attempt had turned out a miserable failure, as he 
acknowledges in his letter to the physician. Doubts had crept 
in, and the stoic was tempted to turn sceptic. Writing long 
after to Sir Gilbert Elliott in regard to his " Dialogues on 
Natural Religion," which sap all religion, he mentions a manu- 
script, afterwards destroyed, which he had written before 
twenty. "It began with an anxious search after arguments to 
confirm the common opinion, doubts stole in, dissipated, re- 
turned, were again dissipated, returned again ; and it was a 
perpetual struggle of a restless imagination against inclina- 
tion, perhaps against reason." 

The letter is supposed by Mr. Burton, on good grounds, to 
have been written to the celebrated Dr. Cheyne, author of the 
" Philosophical Principles of Natural Religion" (1705), and 
" The English Malady ; or a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all 
kinds, Spleens, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal 



Art. xix.] GOES TO FRANCE. 1 19 

Distempers," &c. It is doubtful whether the letter ever reached 
Dr. Cheyne, and it may be doubted whether that eminent phy- 
sician had in all his pharmacopcea a medicine to cure the 
malady of this remarkable youth. Dr. Cheyne defends with 
the common arguments the " great fundamental principles of 
all virtue and all morality : viz., the existence of a supreme and 
infinitely perfect Being ; the freedom of the will, the immor- 
tality of the spirits of all intellectual beings, and the certainty 
of future rewards or punishments." But the youth who pro- 
posed to address him had already a system evolved which un- 
dermined all these. One could have wished that there had 
been a friend at hand to direct him away from Cicero, Seneca, 
and Plutarch, to a better teacher who is never mentioned. Not 
that we should have expected him in his then state to be drawn 
to the character of Jesus, but he might have found something 
in His work fitted to give peace and satisfaction to his dis- 
tracted soul. But it is useless to speculate on these possibil- 
ities. All he says himself is : "In 1734 I went to Bristol with 
some recommendations to eminent merchants, but in a few 
months found that scene totally unsuitable to me. I went over 
to France, with a view of prosecuting my studies in a country 
retreat, and I there laid that plan of life which I have steadily 
and successfully pursued." x 

We can easily picture the youth of twenty-three as he set 
out for France. By nature he is one of a class of persons to be 
found in all countries, but quite as frequently in Scotland as 
anywhere else, who are endowed with a powerful intellect, con- 
joined with a heavy animal temperament, and who, with no 
high aspirations, ideal, ethereal, or spiritual, have a tendency 

1 For some years past it has been well known in literary circles in Edinburgh, 
that there was a scandal about David Hume in his younger years. Having been 
kindly allowed to look into the ecclesiastical records which bear upon it, I find 
that there was a charge brought, but no evidence to support it. A woman did, 
March 5, 1734, charge "Mr. David Home, brother to Ninewells, as being the 
father of her child." But this woman had previously had three illegitimate chil- 
dren ; she had refused to say who was the father of her child when David Hume 
was in the country, though it was known he was leaving, and she brought the 
charge after he was gone. The Presbytery of Chirnside, when the case was 
brought before them, rebuked the woman for her conduct, and there is no other 
record of the matter. It is a curious circumstance that this incident should have 
happened at the time when the youth was leaving his home in so singular a frame 
of mind. 



120 DAVID HUME. [Art. xix. 

to look with suspicion on all kinds of enthusiasm and high- 
flown zeal. With an understanding keen and searching, he 
could not be contented with the appearances of things, and was 
ever bent on penetrating beneath the surface ; and his native 
shrewdness, his hereditary predilections, and the reaction 
against the heats of the previous century, all combined to lead 
him to question common impressions and popular opinions. 
He saw the difficulties which beset philosophical and theolog- 
ical investigations, and was unable to deliver himself from 
them, being without the high sentiments which might have 
lifted him above the low philosophy of his own day in England 
and France, and the sophistries suggested by a restless in- 
tellect. He knew only the ancient Stoic philosophy in the 
pages of Roman authors, and the modern philosophy of Locke, 
as modified by such men as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, and 
driven to its logical consequences by Berkeley : he had tried 
the one in his practical conduct, and the other by his sifting 
intellect, and having found both wanting, he is prepared to 
abandon himself to scepticism, which is the miserable desert 
resorted to by those who despair of truth. Meanwhile his 
great intellectual powers find employment in constructing 
theories of the mind, in which he himself perhaps had no great 
faith, but which seemed the logical conclusion of the acknowl- 
edged philosophical principles of his time, and quite as plau- 
sible as any that had been devised by others, and brought such 
fame to their authors. . 

With these predilections, France was the country which had 
most attractions to him, but was at the same time the most 
unfortunate country he could have gone to, and the middle of 
the eighteenth century the most unfortunate period for visiting 
it. In philosophy, the age had outgrown Descartes and Male- 
branche, Arnauld and Pascal, and the grave and earnest 
thinkers of the previous century, and was embracing the most 
superficial parts of Locke's philosophy, which had been intro- 
duced by Voltaire to the knowledge of Frenchmen, who turned 
it to a wretched sensationalism. In religion he saw around 
him, among the great mass of the people, a very corrupted and 
degenerate form of Christianity, while, among the educated 
classes, infidelity was privately cherished, and was ready to 
burst out. Voltaire had issued his first attack on Christianity, 



Art. xix.] HIS RESIDENCE IN FRANCE. 121 

in his " Epitre a Uranie," published in 1728, and the fire 
spread with a rapidity which showed that there were materials 
ready to catch it and propagate it. Sixty years later, one so 
fond of order and peace would have been scared by the effects 
produced by scepticism, so powerful in overthrowing old 
abuses, and so weak in constructing any thing new or better ; 
but at this time infidelity was full of hope, and promising an 
era of liberty and peace. The very section of the Catholic 
Church which retained the highest faith and the purest moral- 
ity, had unfortunately been involved in a transaction which 
favored the sceptical tendency among shrewd minds. Only 
a few years before, the people believed that the sick were 
healed, and the blind made to see at the tomb of the famous 
Jansenist, the Abbe Paris ; the noise made by the occurrences, 
and the discussions created by them, had not passed away 
when Hume arrived in Paris ; and the youth pondered the 
event, to bring it out years after in his " Essay on Miracles." 
While he lived at La Fleche, a Jesuit plied him with some 
" nonsensical miracle," performed lately in their convent, and 
then and there occurred to him the famous argument which he 
afterwards published against miracles. " As my head was full 
of the topics of the 'Treatise of Human Nature/ which I was 
at that time composing, the argument immediately occurred to 
me, and I thought it very much gravelled my companion ; but 
at last he observed to me that it was impossible for that 
argument to have any validity, because it operated equally 
against the gospel as the Catholic miracles, which observation 
I thought fit to admit as a sufficient answer." 

After living a short time in Paris, he retired to Rheims, and 
afterwards went to La Fleche, where he passed two of the 
three years he spent in France. We know nothing of his em- 
ployments these years, except that he devoted himself most 
earnestly to the composition of his " Treatise on Human 
Nature." In 1737 he brought it over with him to London, 
where he published the two first books the end of the following- 
year. 

This treatise is by far the most important of all his philo- 
sophical works. If we except certain speculations in history 
and political economy, it contains nearly all his favorite ideas. 
He devoted to it all the resources of his mighty intellect. He 



122 DAVID HUME. [Art. xix. 

had read extensively, pondered deeply, and taken immense 
pains in polishing his style. He could scarcely, indeed, be 
called a learned man, in the technical sense of the term, 
but he was well informed. We could have wished that he had 
possessed wider sympathies with earnest seekers after truth 
in all ages, but this was not in the nature of the man. His 
knowledge of Greek was very imperfect at this time (he after- 
wards renewed his acquaintance with that language) ; what he 
knew of Greek philosophy was chiefly through Cicero (his 
very pictures of the Stoics and Epicureans are Roman rather 
than Grecian), and he never entered into the spirit of such 
deep and earnest thinkers as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, — 
he tells us somewhere that the fame of Aristotle is utterly 
decayed. In respect even of modern writers, he never com- 
prehended the profundity of such men as Cudworth and 
Descartes in the previous century ; and he had no appreciation 
of the speculations of Clarke and Leibnitz, who lived in the 
age immediately preceding his own. He belongs to the cold, 
elegant, doubting, and secular eighteenth century ; and, setting 
little value on antiquity, he builds for the present and the future 
on the philosophy of his own time. 

As to style, which he greatly cultivated, the models which 
he set before him were the Roman prose writers, the French 
authors of his own day, and the Englishmen who were intro- 
ducing the French clearness and point, such as Shaftesbury, 
Bolingbroke, and Pope, — he says : " The first polite prose we 
have was writ by Swift." Though he took great pains, he never 
altogether succeeded in weeding out his Scotticisms, nor in 
acquiring a genuine English idiom ; but his style is always 
clear, manly, and elegant, and worthy of his weighty thoughts. 
When he broke down his elaborate treatise into smaller ones, 
he endeavored to catch the ease and freedom of the lighter 
French literature ; but neither the subjects discussed nor the 
ideas of the author admit of such treatment ; and though the 
essays are more ornate, and have more attempts at smartness 
and repartee, the student will ever betake himself to the 
treatise, as containing the only systematic, and by far the 
most satisfactory statement of his views. 

He is now publicly committed to a theory, and he adheres 
to it resolutely and doggedly. In after years he said : " So 



Art. xix.] PUBLICATION OF HIS TREATISE. 1 23 

great an undertaking, planned before I was one-and-twenty, 
and composed before twenty-five, must necessarily be very de- 
fective. I have repented my haste a hundred and a hundred 
times." But this refers to the form and style, not the matter. 
He never abandoned nor modified the scepticism advanced in 
the early work. When he failed in obtaining a hearing for his 
views in the more elaborate treatise, he set them forth in 
" Essays," which might be more attractive to the general 
reader. He had instituted an inquiry, and satisfied himself 
that speculative truth was unattainable, either in philosophy 
or theology, owing to the weakness of the human intellect, and 
he did not wish to be disturbed with questionings. He seems 
to have studiously abstained from speaking on such subjects 
in social intercourse, except at times, in a tone of playful 
humor, not meant to be offensive ; and on becoming an 
author he formed the resolution " never to reply to anybody." 
He rather delighted to associate with ministers of religion, 
such as Robertson, Blair, and Carlyle, whom he reckoned 
moderate and tolerant, and helpful in producing a religious in- 
difference ; but he never allowed them to try to convert him to 
the truths of natural and revealed religion which they held by ; 
and when Dr. Blair ventured on one occasion to make the 
attempt, he received such a reply as prevented the repetition 
of it on any future occasion. There are traditions of him and 
Adam Smith conversing familiarly on such subjects on the 
sands of Kirkcaldy, and of Hume succeeding in bringing his 
friend over to infidelity ; but we have no authenticated record 
of Hume ever opening to any human being the religious or 
irreligious convictions of his soul. A good-natured and so- 
ciable man, kind and indulgent to those with whom he came in 
contact, he passed through life a solitary being, certainly with 
no God, and apparently with no human being to whom to 
unbosom himself. 

Having set the matured and confirmed man before our read- 
ers, we have no intention of detailing minutely the events of 
his future life. Having published his work, he retired to Nine- 
wells to wait the result. " Never literary attempt was more 
unfortunate than my ' Treatise of Human Nature.' It fell dead- 
born from the press without reaching such distinction as even 
to create a murmur among the zealots." He evidently felt the 



124 DAVID HUME. [Art. xix. 

disappointment " I am out of humor with myself." He was 
amazed that the liberty he had taken with all established truth 
had not created a sensation. But he was conscious of intel- 
lectual power : he had laid his plan for life ; and he indomitably 
persevered in his literary career. Next year he published the 
third volume of his treatise, that on ethics, with no better suc- 
cess. In 1 74 1 he printed at Edinburgh the first, and in 1742 
the second, of his " Essays Moral and Political." The work 
was favorably received and he was encouraged. In 1744 he 
was anxious to be appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy in 
the University of Edinburgh, but public sentiment could not 
bear the idea of one so sceptical being appointed a teacher of 
youth. He was a younger brother without a profession, and 
he wished to have a competency ; and so in 1745, the year of 
the rebellion of Prince Charles, he became the companion and 
guide of the weak-minded Marquis of Annandale. The engage- 
ment brought him some accession of fortune, but terminated 
abruptly from the caprice of the Marquis. In 1747 he attended 
General St. Clair in his military embassy to the Courts of 
Vienna and Turin. There he saw a variety of life ; and he 
congratulates himself that when the engagement closed, he 
was "master of near a thousand pounds." In 1748 he cast the 
first part of his unfortunate treatise in a new form, in the 
" Inquiry concerning Human Understanding," but the work 
failed to excite any interest. His brother at Ninewells having 
married in 175 1, his place of residence was now Edinburgh, 
where he was appointed to, and held for five years, the office of 
librarian to the advocates' library, a situation which brought 
him little or no emolument. In 1752 he published in Edin- 
burgh the second part of his essays, being his " Political Dis- 
courses." This work was immediately received with acclamation ; 
and, being translated into French, it procured him a high repu- 
tation, and in fact awakened those discussions which issued in 
making political economy a science in the " Wealth of Nations." 
Whatever merit Hume may have in demolishing error, he 
has, I believe, established very little positive truth : what he 
effected in this way was done in political economy. The same 
year he published his " Inquiry concerning the Principles of Mor- 
als," being an improved version of the third part of his treatise. 
" Meanwhile my bookseller, A. Millar, informed me that my 



Art. xix.] HIS HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 125 

former publications (all but the unfortunate treatise) were 
beginning to be the subject of conversation, that the sale of 
them was gradually increasing, and that new editions were 
demanded. Answers by reverends and right reverends came 
out two or three in a year ; and I found, by Dr. Warburton's 
railing, that the books were beginning to be esteemed in good 
company." He had long had the idea of writing some histori- 
cal work, and from the time of his being appointed librarian to 
the well-stored advocates' collection of books, he formed the plan 
of writing the " History of England." The first volume com- 
menced with the accession of the house of Stuart, but was 
received so coldly that in a twelvemonth the publisher sold 
only forty-five copies. Nevertheless he persevered, bringing 
out volume after volume, till at last the great merits of the work 
were acknowledged. This perseverance in his life plan, in 
spite of discouragements, I reckon as the noblest feature in 
Hume's character. It does not concern us here to speak of 
the excellencies and defects of the history. It could be shown 
that the prejudices running throughout it were his constitu- 
tional and hereditary ones, and that the work, as a whole, is an 
illustration of his metaphysical and ethical theory. 

In 1763 he received from the Earl of Hertford an invitation 
to attend him on his embassy to Paris. His visit to the capital 
of France on this occasion deserves a special notice. It may 
be doubted whether there ever were such compliments paid to 
any literary man. Dukes, mareschals, foreign ambassadors, 
vied with each other in honoring him. The famous men, whose 
persons and conversations he liked best, were D'Alembert, 
Marmontel, Diderot, Duclos, Helvetius, and old President 
Henault ; and he writes to Dr. Blair, and bids him tell Dr. 
Robertson that there was not a single deist among them, mean- 
ing that there was none of them but went farther. He met 
also with Buffon, Malesherbes, Crebillon, Holbach, Renauld, 
Suard, and Turgot. 

But he was the special favorite of the ladies, who at that 
time ruled the fashion in Paris. In particular, he was flattered 
and adored by the Countess de Boufflers. His correspondence 
with that lady had commenced in 1761. She addressed him 
first, declaring the admiration which " your sublime work (the 
1 History of England ') has awakened in me." " I know no terms 



126 DAVID HUME. [Art. xix. 

capable of expressing what I felt in reading the work. I was 
moved, transported ; and the emotion which it caused me, is in 
some measure painful by its continuance. It elevates the soul ; 
it fills the heart with sentiments of humanity and benevolence ; 
it enlightens the intellect, by showing that true happiness is 
closely connected with virtue ; and discovers, by the same light, 
what is the end, the sole end, of every reasonable being " ! " In 
truth, I believed I had before my eyes the work of some celes- 
tial being, free from the passions of humanity, who, for the 
benefit of the human race, has designed to write the events of 
these latter times " ! The philosopher is evidently gratified. 
" What new wonder is this which your letter presents to me ? 
I not only find a lady, who, in the bloom of beauty and height 
of reputation, can withdraw herself from the pleasures of a gay 
court, and find leisure to cultivate the sciences, but deigns to 
support a correspondence with a man of letters, in a remote 
country, and to reward his labors by a suffrage the most agree- 
able of all others to a man who has any spark of generous sen- 
timent or taste for true glory." This lady, it is proper to say 
in plain terms, was the wife of the Comte de BoufHers, still 
alive, but the mistress of the Prince of Conti, who superintended 
for the king that mean diplomatic correspondence which he 
carried on unknown to his ministers. Hume might also be 
seen attending the evening salons of Madame Geoffrin, who 
had been the daughter of a valet de chambre, and was now the 
centre of a circle of artists and men of letters. He also waited 
on the entertainments of the famous Mademoiselle de l'Espi- 
nasse, who, originally an illegitimate child, had raised herself 
by being, first, the humble companion, and then the rival of 
Madame Du Deffaud, and was well known to have been the 
mistress of a number of successive or contemporaneous lovers. 
There must have been something in the philosophy of Hume 
which recommended him to so many ladies of this description. 
We believe they were glad to find so eminent a philosopher, 
with a system which did not seem to bear hard upon them. 
The courtiers told him that Madame de Pompadour " was never 
heard to say so much to any man." 

He says of himself : " I eat nothing but ambrosia, drink noth- 
ing but nectar, breathe nothing but incense, and tread on noth- 
ing but flowers. Every man I meet, and still more every lady, 



Art. xix.] HIS RECEPTION IN PARIS. 127 

would think they were wanting in the most indispensable duty 
if they did not make a long and elaborate harangue in my 
praise." Lord Charlemont has given us a picture, or rather a 
caricature, of his person as he met him at Turin some years 
before this. " His face was broad and flat, his mouth wide, 
and without any other expression than that of imbecility. His 
eyes vacant and spiritless, and the corpulence of his whole per- 
son was far better fitted to communicate the idea of a turtle- 
eating alderman than of a refined philosopher. His speech in 
English was rendered ridiculous by the broadest Scotch accent, 
and his French was, if possible, still more laughable." This 
was the man who was made by the Parisian ladies to take the 
part, in an acted tableau, of a sultan assailed by two female 
slaves : " On le place sur un sopha entre les deux plus jolies 
femmes de Paris, il les regarde attentivement, il se frappe le 
ventre et les genoux a plusieurs reprises, et ne trouve jamais 
autre chose a leur dire que, — ' Eh bien ! mes demoiselles. . . . 
Eh bien ! nous voila done. . . . Eh bien ! vous voila. . . . vous 
voila ici.' " His good sense led him to see the vanity of all 
this : but he was pleased with it ; and he often expresses a wish 
to settle in Paris, or somewhere in France. 

When he was introduced to the Dauphin, his son, afterwards 
the unfortunate Louis XVI., but then a boy of nine, stepped 
forth, evidently by instruction, and told him how many friends 
and admirers he had in the country, and that he reckoned him- 
self among the number from the reading of many passages in his 
works. The Comte de Provence (who, after his long exile, be- 
came Louis XVI II.), a year or so younger, now approached Hume, 
and told him he had been long and impatiently expected in 
France, and that he anticipated great pleasure from reading his 
fine history. Even the Comte d'Artois, afterwards Charles X., 
but then a boy of six, had to mumble a panegyric. A wise man 
learned in providence might have seen that awful miseries must 
issue from a state of things in which, as Horace Walpole point- 
edly expresses it, " There is a God and the king to be pulled 
down first, and men and women are devoutly employed in the 
demolition," while princes were taught to cherish the viper that 
was to sting them. It would have been an appropriate punish- 
ment to have got Hume placed, half a century later, in the 
scenes of the French Revolution, to let him eat the fruit of 
the seed he had helped to sow. 



128 DAVID HUME. [Art. xix. 

But what, it may be asked, did he think of the state of 
society in which he had to mingle ? It is evident that he was 
horrified at times with the proclaimed atheism of men and 
women. But what did he think of the morality of the circles 
in which he moved, more especially of the loose relationship 
of the marriage tie ? Did his utilitarian theory of morals, of 
which he surely knew the bearing and tendency, allow .of such 
a state of things ? It is certain that Hume uttered no protest 
at the time, and he has left behind no condemnation of the 
morality of France, while he was fond of making sly and con- 
temptuous allusions to the manifestations of religious zeal in 
his own country. The tone of morality in France could never 
have been amended by him, nor, we venture to say, by any 
utilitarian. When the husband of Madame Boufflers dies, he 
writes to her as a person now within reach of honor and fe- 
licity ; that is, as likely to be married to the Prince de Conti. 
However, the prince declines, and Hume gives her wise enough 
counsel : gradually to diminish her connection with the prince, 
and at last to separate from him ; and, he says : " If I could dis- 
pose of my fate, nothing would be so much my choice as to live 
where I might cultivate your friendship. Your taste for trav- 
elling might also afford you a plausible pretence for putting 
this plan in execution ; a journey to Italy would loosen your 
connections here ; and, if it were delayed, I would, with some 
probability, expect to have the felicity of attending you thither." 
One can picture the scene ; the countess travelling with Hume 
attending her. But the prospect had not such attractions as 
to induce her to leave the prince. Hume continued his cor- 
respondence with her ; and, on -hearing of the death of the 
Prince of Conti, wrote her within a few days of his own death, 
knowing he was dying, and expresses no condemnation of her 
past conduct. The question arises whether this would be the 
moral tone allowed in a community in which the word of God 
is discarded, and utilitarian principles are adopted ? 

We do not mean to discuss the miserable quarrel between 
him and Rousseau. His attention was called to the alleged ill- 
usage of Rousseau by Madame de Boufflers, who described him 
as a noble and disinterested soul, " flying from intercourse with 
the world," and " feeling pleasure only in solitude." Hume, 
believing him to be persecuted, exerted himself to help him. 



Art. xix.] HIS EDINBURGH LIFE. 1 29 

But his morbid vanity and intolerable habits (he insisted in 
taking his disgusting governante with him when he visited a 
family) rendered it impossible to befriend him. Unwilling to 
allow himself to think, or let others conclude, that he was indebted 
to any one, he repaid Hume's manly and delicate kindness with 
suspicion ; and Hume, who began by describing him as a man 
" whose modesty proceeded from ignorance of his own excel- 
lence," ended by declaring him to be " the blackest and most 
atrocious villain beyond comparison that now exists in the 
world." It is justice to Hume to say that he was always kind 
to persons of literary ability. Thus, he interested himself 
much in Thomas Blacklock, a blind man, of some poetical 
talent, when the people of Kirkcudbright declined to accept 
him as their minister. He also did all in his power to bring 
into notice the publications of Robertson, Adam Smith, and 
Ferguson. 

By his connection with the embassy and the sale of his 
works, which had become great, he now attained a compe- 
tency which made him feel independent. He had many 
temptations to settle in France, but old associations drew 
him back to Scotland. It was proposed by Lord Hertford 
to send him to Ireland as Secretary ; but the Irish would not 
receive him, because he was a Scotchman. It was on this oc- 
casion that the Princess Amelia said that she thought the affair 
might be easily accommodated. " Why may not Lord Hert- 
ford give a bishopric to Mr. Hume?" In 1767-68 he was 
appointed by Lord Conway Under-Secretary of State, and 
had charge of Scottish affairs, including the patronage of 
churches ! But his residence was now mainly in Edinburgh, 
first in the old town, afterwards in a house which he built in 
the new town, in St. David Street, so called as the name had 
been chalked on the wall by a witty young lady as she passed. 
Here he was the acknowledged chief of a literary circle, em- 
bracing men of considerable eminence, such as Robertson, Blair, 
Lord Karnes, Adam Ferguson, and Adam Smith at Kirkcaldy, 
who all looked up to him with respect. He rather enjoyed 
being an object of wonder to the multitude beyond the favored 
circle in which he mingled, and made many jocular remarks 
about the unpopularity of his opinions. Good-natured, socia- 
ble, and avoiding controversy, he suffered few annoyances 

9 



130 DAVID HUME. [Art. xix. 

because of his scepticism — certainly none that deserved to 
be called persecution. For we suppose it will be scarcely 
reckoned as such, that, on one occasion, in picking his 
steps from his lodging in the old town to the house he 
was building in the new, he fell into a swamp, and, observ- 
ing some Newhaven fishwives passing, he called to them 
for help, but on learning that it was Hume the unbeliever 
who was in such a plight, they refused to aid him till he 
said the Lord's prayer. He carried on a pleasant correspond- 
ence with Sir Gilbert Elliott of Minto, with Mure of Caldwell, 
and others of a literary or philosophic taste. He lived on fa- 
miliar terms with several of the moderate clergy, such as 
Robertson and Blair, and at times mingled in their ecclesias- 
tical counsels. Many of the younger ministers reckoned it an 
honor to be admitted to his society, and he encouraged them 
to associate with him. These circumstances have led some to 
think that the leading moderate ministers of that period must 
have been infidels in secret, and acting hypocritically in pro- 
fessing Christianity ; but there is no ground for such a charge : 
they believed sincerely in the doctrines of natural religion, and 
in the Word of God as inspired to teach a pure morality and 
the immortality of the soul. But it is equally clear, that they 
had no faith in the peculiar Bible doctrines of grace ; and Hume 
was delighted to find them frowning on all religious earnest- 
ness, and advancing so rapidly on the road to deism and philo- 
sophic indifference. 

By April, 1776, Hume knew that he would not recover from 
the disease with which he had been afflicted for two years, 
being a disorder in the bowels. He bought a piece of ground 
in the new church-yard in the Calton Hill as a burying-place, 
and left money for the erection of a small monument, with the 
simple inscription, " David Hume." He wrote " My Own Life," 
giving an account of his literary career. In his will Adam Smith 
had been appointed his literary executor, and two hundred 
pounds had been bequeathed to him for the pains he might 
take in correcting and publishing his " Dialogues on Natural 
Religion," a work written before 1 75 1, but not yet given to the 
world. But he had ground for fearing that Smith might be un- 
willing to take the odium of editing such a work, and so he took 
effectual steps to guard against its suppression. He came to 



Art. xix.] HIS DEATH-BED. 131 

an understanding with Smith on the subject, and in a codicil 
to his will, dated August 7, he left the manuscripts to Strahan 
the publisher, ordaining " that if my ' Dialogues ' from what- 
ever cause be not published within two years and a half after 
my death, as also the account of my life, the property shall re- 
turn to my nephew David, whose duty in publishing them, as 
the last request of his uncle, must be approved of by all the 
world." Strahan was as indisposed as Smith to undertake the 
responsibility of publishing so offensive a work. The truth is, 
Hume's Scottish friends, though they had abandoned Chris- 
tianity, were most anxious to have left to them a natural re- 
ligion, in which they might find a refuge and some comfort ; and 
in the " Dialogues" Hume had undermined this last support. The 
" Dialogues " were published in 1779 by the author's nephew. 

In April he took a journey to Bath for the benefit of his 
health, but with no hope of ultimate recovery. John Home, 
the author of " Douglas, a Tragedy," travelled with him, and has 
preserved a diary. He talked cheerfully of the topics of the 
day, and of his favorite subjects, lamenting over the state of 
the nation, and predicting that the national debt must be the 
ruin of Britain. He returned to Edinburgh about the begin- 
ning of July. Dr. Cullen reports : " He passed most part of the 
day in his drawing-room : admitted the visits of his friends, and 
with his usual spirits conversed with them upon literature, pol- 
itics, or whatever was accidentally started." Colonel Edmon- 
stoune had come to take leave of him ; Hume said he had been 
reading a few days before, Lucian's " Dialogues of the Dead," 
and, among all the reasons for not entering readily into Cha- 
ron's boat, he could not find one that fitted him, and he invented 
several peculiar ones to give the boatman. " I might urge, 
4 Have a little patience, good Charon : I have been endeavoring 
to open the eyes of the public. If I live a few years longer, I 
may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfall of some of the 
prevailing systems of superstition.' But Charon would then 
lose all temper and decency : ' You loitering rogue, that will 
not happen these many hundred years. Do you fancy I will 
grant you a lease for so long a term ? Get into the boat this 
instant, you lazy, loitering rogue.' " All this is evidently very 
gratifying to the colonel. Dr. Black reports that he " passes 
his time very well with the assistance of amusing books." 



132 DAVID HUME. [Art. xix. 

Dr. Cullen continues : " For a few days before his death, he 
became more averse to receive visits ; speaking became more 
and more difficult to him ; and for twelve hours before his 
death his speech failed him altogether. His senses and judg- 
ment did not fail till the last hour of his life. He constantly 
discovered a strong sensibility to the attention and care of his 
friends, and, amidst great uneasiness and languor, never be- 
trayed any peevishness or impatience." 

This was the account left by his literary friends, and it 
was matter of triumph to them that he betrayed no signs of 
fear in his hour of weakness. Are we to allow, that, as in the 
early ages of the world's history, those who did not like to re- 
tain God in their knowledge continued all their lives in the 
most abject superstition ; so in these last days, under other 
influences, there may be persons so bewildered that they die 
as they live, without any fixed religious belief? The fact, 
if it be a fact, is not flattering to the race ; nor is the prospect 
encouraging. Good Christians had hoped, that ere he left the 
world there might be a change of sentiment, and an acknowl- 
edgment of the existence of God, and the need of a Saviour. 
Many of them maintained that it was impossible for an infidel 
to die in peace, and it was reported among religious circles, 
that, though he was cheerful when his unbelieving friends 
visited him, he had terrible uneasiness when left alone. Some 
of these rumors utterly break down when we try to trace them 
to their original sources. The statement, however, of Mr. 
Robert Haldane of Airthrey, as to what he learned from his 
neighbor, Mr. Abercromby of Tullibody, must contain some 
truth. Mr. Abercromby was travelling to Haddington in a 
lumbering stage-coach. " The conversation during the tedious 
journey turned on the death-bed of the great philosopher, and 
as Mr. Abercromby's son-in-law, Colonel Edmonstoune of 
Newton, was one of Hume's intimate friends, he had heard 
from him much of the buoyant cheerfulness which had en- 
livened the sick room of the dying man. Whilst the conver- 
sation was running on in this strain, a respectable-looking 
female, dressed in black, who made a fourth in the coach, 
begged permission to offer a remark : ' Gentlemen/ she said, 
' I attended Mr. Hume on his death-bed, but, I can assure you, I 
hope never again to attend the death-bed of a philosopher! 



Art. xix.] INFLUENCE OF HIS PHILOSOPHY. 133 

They then cross-examined her as to her meaning ; and she 
told them that, when his friends were with him, Mr. Hume 
was cheerful even to frivolity, but that when alone he was 
often overwhelmed with unutterable gloom, and had in his 
hours of depression declared that he had been in search of 
light all his life, but was now in greater darkness than ever." 
This is Mr. Haldane's statement, as taken from Mr. Aber- 
cromby. 1 We confess we should like to know more of this 
woman in black, and to have taken part in the cross-question- 
ing. The question is left in that region of doubt where Hume 
himself left all religion. He died on Monday, August 26, 
1776, at four o'clock in the afternoon. 

Everybody knows that Hume was a sceptic. It is not so 
generally known that he has developed a full system of the 
human mind. Students of philosophy should make themselves 
acquainted with it. It has in fact been the stimulating cause of 
all later European philosophy : of that of Reid and his school ; 
of that of Kant, and the powerful thinkers influenced by him ; 
and of that of M. Cousin, and his numerous followers in France, 
in their attempt to combine Reid and Kant. Nor is it to be 
omitted that Mr. J. S. Mill, in his " Examination of Hamilton," 
has reproduced to a large extent the theory of Hume, but with- 
out so clearly seeing or candidly avowing the consequences. I 
rather think that Mr. Mill himself is scarcely aware of the 
extent of the resemblance between his doctrines and those of 
the Scottish sceptic ; as he seems to have wrought out his con- 
clusions from data supplied him by his own father, Mr. James 
Mill, who, however, has evidently drawn much from Hume. 
The circumstance that Mr. Mill's work was welcomed by such 
acclamations by the chief literary organs in London is a proof, 
either that the would-be leaders of opinion are so ignorant of 
philosophy that they do not see the consequences ; or that the 
writers, being chiefly young men bred at Oxford or Cambridge, 
are fully prepared to accept them in the reaction against the 
revived mediaevalism which was sought to be imposed upon 
them. In no history of philosophy that we are acquainted with 
is there a good account of the system of Hume. As few per- 
sons now read, or in fact ever did read, through his weighty 

1 " Memoirs of R. and J. A. Haldane," chap. xxv. 



134 DAVID HUME. [Art. xix. 

volumes, we are in hopes that some may feel grateful to us, if 
in short space we give them an expository and critical account 
of his philosophy, with a special facing towards the philosophy 
which has been introduced among us by the British section of 
the nescient school of Comte. 

Hume begins thus his famous " Treatise of Human Nature : " 
"All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves 
into two distinct kinds, which I call impressions and ideas. 
The difference betwixt them consists in the degrees of force 
and liveliness with which they strike upon the mind, and make 
their way into our thought or consciousness. Those percep- 
tions which enter with most force and violence, we may name 
impressions, and under this name I comprehend all our sensa- 
tions, passions, and emotions, as they make their first appear- 
ance in the soul. By ideas t I mean the faint images of these 
in thinking and reasoning ; such, for instance, are all the per- 
ceptions excited by the present discourse, excepting only those 
which arise from the sight and touch, and excepting the imme- 
diate pleasure or uneasiness it may occasion." He tells us, 
that, in the use of terms, " I rather restore the word idea to its 
original sense, from which Mr. Locke had perverted it, in mak- 
ing it stand for all our perceptions." This theory is certainly 
very simple, but surely it is lamentably scanty. It will not do 
to place under the same head, and call by the one name of 
impressions, two such things as the affections of the senses on 
the one hand, and the mental emotions of hope, fear, joy, and 
sorrow, on the other. Nor can we allow him to describe all 
our sense-perceptions by the vague name of impressions. 
What is meant by impressions ? If the word has any proper 
meaning, it must signify that there is something impressing, 
without which there would be no impression, and also some- 
thing impressed. If Hume admits all this to be in the impres- 
sion we ask him to go on with us to inquire what is in the 
thing impressed and in the thing that impresses, and we are at 
once in the region of existences, internal and external. " I 
never," he says, " catch myself at any time without a percep- 
tion, and never can observe any thing but the perception." His 
very language contradicts itself. He talks of catching himself. 
What is this self that he catches ? But he may say it is only a 
perception. I reply that there is more. We never observe 



Art. xix. ] MEMOR Y. 1 3 5 

a perception alone. We always observe self as perceiving. It 
is true that I never can catch myself at any time without a per- 
ception ; but it is quite as certain, and we have the same evi- 
dence for it, that we never observe a perception except when 
we observe self perceiving. Let us unfold what is in this self, 
and we shall find that it no way resembles an impression, like 
that left by a seal upon wax. 1 In regard to certain of our per- 
ceptions, those through the senses, we observe not only the self 
perceiving, but an object perceived. 

He now explains the way in which ideas appear. By memory 
the impressions come forth in their original order and position 
as ideas. This is a defective account of memory, conscious- 
ness being the witness. In memory, we have not only a 
reproduction of a sensation, or, it may be, a mental affection, 
we recognize it as having been before us in time past. Of all 
this we have as clear evidence as we have of the presence of 
the idea. 2 In imagination the ideas are more strong and lively, 
and are transposed and changed. This, he says, is effected by 
an associating quality ; and he here develops his account of the 
laws of association, which has been so commended. But the 
truth is, his views on this subject, so far from being an advance 
on those of Hutcheson, are rather a retrogression : they are cer- 
tainly far behind those of his contemporary Turnbull. He seems 
to confine the operation of association to the exercise of imagi- 
nation : he does not see that our very memories are regulated 
by the same principle ; nay, he allows that the imagination can 
join two ideas without it. The associating qualities are said 
by him to be three in number : resemblance, contiguity in time 
or place, and cause or effect. " I do not find," he says, " that 

1 J. S. Mill labors to derive all our ideas and convictions from sensations. 
He is to be met by showing that we never have a sensation without knowing a 
self as sentient. 

2 Mr. Mill is in difficulties at this point, and avows it in a foot-note, p. 174: 
" Our belief in the veracity of memory is evidently ultimate ; no reason can be 
given for it which does not presuppose the belief, and assume it to be well 
grounded." The full facts of the recognitive power of memory are not embraced 
in this brief enunciation, but there is much stated, and more implied ; he should 
have inquired how much is involved, and he would have seen that there is truth 
admitted fatal to his system. He should also have shown on what ground he 
proclaims this belief to be "evidently ultimate," and then we might have shown 
that on the same ground, that is self-evidence, we are entitled to call in the other 
ultimate beliefs. 



136 DAVID HUME. [Art. xix. 

any philosopher has attempted to enumerate all the principles 
of association." But the classification propounded by him bears 
so close a resemblance to that of Aristotle, that we must believe 
that the one given by the Stagyrite had, in the course of his 
reading, fallen under his notice, though he had forgotten the 
circumstance. The difference between the two lies in Hume 
giving us cause and effect, instead of contrast as proposed by 
the Greek philosopher. It has often been remarked that 
Hume's arrangement is redundant, inasmuch as cause and 
effect, according to him, are nothing but contiguity in time 
and place. 

He now shows how our complex ideas are formed. Follow- 
ing Locke, he represents these as consisting of substances, 
modes, and relations. He dismisses substance very summarily. 
He proceeds on the view of substance given by Locke, one of 
the most defective and unsatisfactory parts of his philosophy. 
Locke stood up for some unknown thing, called substance, 
behind the qualities. Berkeley had shown that there is no evi- 
dence of the existence of such a substratum. Hume assumes 
that we have no idea of external substance different from the 
qualities, and he proceeds to show that we have no notion of 
the substance mind distinct from particular perceptions. " I 
believe none will assert that substance is either a color, or a 
sound, or a taste. The idea of substance must therefore be 
derived from an impression of reflection, if it really exist. But 
the impressions of reflection resolve themselves into our pas- 
sions and emotions, none of which can possibly represent a 
substance." A substance is thus nothing else than a collection 
of particular qualities united by the imagination. He thus 
suits the idea to his preconceived theory, instead of looking at 
the peculiar idea, and suiting his theory to the facts. I give up 
the idea of an unknown substratum behind the qualities. I 
stand up only for what we know. In consciousness, we know 
self, and in sense-perception we know the external objects as 
existing things exercising qualities. In this is involved what 
I reckon the true idea of substance. We can as little know 
the qualities apart from an object exercising them, as we can an 
object apart from qualities. We know both in one concrete 
act, and we have the same evidence of the one as the other. 

When he comes to modes, he examines them by the doctrine 



Art. xix.] ABSTRACT AND GENERAL IDEAS. 137 

of abstract or general ideas propounded by Berkeley, which he 
characterizes "as one of the greatest and most valuable dis- 
coveries that has been made of late years in the republic of 
letters." According to this very defective theory (as it appears 
to us), all abstract or general ideas are nothing but particular 
ones annexed to a certain term. Like Locke, Hume confounds 
abstract and general ideas, which should be carefully distin- 
guished : the former meaning the notion of the part of an object 
as a part, more particularly an attribute ; the other, the notion 
of objects possessing common attributes, the notion being such 
that it embraces all the objects possessing the common attri- 
butes. Abstraction and generalization are most important 
intellectual operations, the one bringing specially to view what 
is involved in the concrete knowledge (not impression) of the 
individual, and the other exhibiting the qualities in respect of 
which objects agree. Without such elaborative processes, we 
should never know all that is involved in our original percep- 
tions by sense and consciousness. Nor is it to be forgotten, 
that when the concrete is a real object, the abstract is a real 
quality existing in the object ; and that when the singulars are 
real, the universal is also real, that is, a class all the objects in 
which possess common qualities. Here again we find Hume 
overlooking one of the most essential of our mental attributes, 
and thus degrading human intelligence. In relation to the 
particular end for which he introduces his doctrine, I hold that 
substance and mode are known in one concrete act and that 
we can separate them by abstraction for more particular con- 
sideration ; the one having quite as real an existence as the 
other, and both having their reality in the singular object 
known by sense and consciousness. 

He goes on to a very subtle discussion as to our ideas of 
space and time. He says, that " it is from the disposition of 
visible and tangible objects we receive the idea of space, and 
from the succession of ideas and impressions we form the idea 
of time." The statement requires to be amended. It is not 
from the disposition of separate objects we have the idea of 
space, but in the very perception of material objects we know 
them as extended, that is, occupying space ; and in the very 
remembrance of events we have time in the concrete, that is, 
events happening in time past. He is therefore wrong in the 



8 DA VID HUME. [Art. xix. 



sceptical conclusion which he draws, that the ideas of space 
and time are no distinct ideas ; for they are ideas formed by a 
high intellectual process from things immediately known. Tak- 
ing a defective view of the nature and function of abstraction, 
he denies that we can form any idea of a vacuum or extension 
without matter. He maintains that the idea we form of any 
finite quality is not infinitely divisible. The dispute, he says, 
should not be about the nature of mathematical points, but 
about our ideas of them ; and that, in the division of our ideas, 
we come to a minimum, to an indivisible idea. This whole 
controversy seems to me to arise from a misapprehension. Our 
idea of space, it is evident, is neither divisible nor indivisible ; 
and as to space, it is not divisible either finitely or infinitely ; 
for while we can divide matter, that is, have a space between, 
we cannot separate any portion of space from all other space : 
space is and must be continuous. He is evidently jealous of 
the alleged certainty of mathematics, which seemed to be op- 
posed to his universal scepticism. He maintains that the 
objects of geometry are mere ideas in the mind. I admit that 
surfaces, lines, points, have no independent existence, but 
they have all an existence in solid bodies. By an excess of 
ingenuities and subtleties, he would drive us to the conclusion 
that space and time are mere ideas, for which we need not seek 
a corresponding reality ; a conclusion unfortunately accepted 
by Kant, who thus opened the way to the empty idealism 
which so long reigned in the German philosophy. 1 

1 J. S. Mill's treatment of space and time is superficial. He brings in time 
quietly without noticing it, or giving any account of it. He does not see that the 
idea of it in the concrete is involved in memory ; we remember the event as hap- 
pening in time past. He derives our idea of space from that of the time occupied 
by our muscular sensations : " When we say that there is a space between A and 
B, we mean that some amount of these muscular sensations must intervene." 
" Resisting points " are said to be "at different distances from one another, be- 
cause the series of intervening muscular sensations is longer in some cases than 
in others " (pp. 228, 229). He thus avowedly makes, p. 227, an "identification" 
of length in time and length in space "as one ; " whereas our consciousness de- 
clares them to be as different as it is possible for ideas to be. The hypothesis on 
which he and Professor Bain build their whole theory of the origin of our idea of 
extension, viz., the sensations of our muscles, is doubted by some. The conclu- 
sion of E. H. Weber, from numerous and careful observations, is : " Of the vol- 
untary motion of our limbs, we know originally nothing. We do not perceive 
the motion of our muscles by their own sensations, but attain a knowledge of 
them only when perceived by another sense " (see Abbot on " Sight and Touch," 
p. 71). 



Art. xix.] HIS CLASSIFICATION OF RELATIONS. 1 39 

The result reached is summed up in the statement : " As 
long as we confine our speculations to the appearances of ob- 
jects to our senses, without entering into disquisitions con- 
cerning their real nature and operations, we are safe from all 
difficulties, and can never be embarrassed by any question ; " 
but, " if we carry our inquiry beyond the appearances of 
objects to the senses, I am afraid that most of our conclusions 
will be full of scepticism and uncertainty." The intelligent 
reader will here perceive the source whence Kant derived his 
doctrine that the senses give us, not things, but phenomena, 
that is appearances, and that we are involved in contradiction 
when we suppose that they furnish more. However great the 
logical power of the German metaphysician, it is clear that 
he did not possess the shrewdness of the common-sense phi- 
losopher of Scotland, when he adopted the conclusion of the 
sceptic as his starting-point. 

He has now to face the important subjects of existence and 
knowledge. Proceeding on his assumption that nothing is 
present to the mind but perceptions, he argues, I think logi- 
cally (if the premises be allowed), that we can never advance 
a step beyond ourselves, and that it is " impossible for us so 
much as to conceive or form an idea of any thing specifically 
different from ideas or impressions." As knowledge had been 
represented by Locke as consisting in comparison (I reckon 
this a false and dangerous doctrine), Hume has to consider the 
relations which the mind of man can discover. 

These he represents as being seven : those of resemblance, 
identity, space and time, quantity, degree, contrariety, cause 
and effect. This is a very good enumeration of the relations 
perceivable by man : it is certainly very much superior to 
that of many later metaphysicians, British and Continental. 
" These relations may be divided into two classes, into such as 
depend entirely on the ideas which we compare together, and 
such as may be changed without any change in the ideas." In 
the first class he places resemblance, contrariety, degree, 
proportion. These depend solely on our ideas. These only 
can be the objects of knowledge and certainty, but they can 
never go beyond our ideas, which can never go beyond our 
impressions. The other four do not depend on our ideas, 
and might seem to carry us beyond them ; but this he shows 



140 DAVID HUME. [Art. xix. 

is an illusion. In identity, and time and space, we can never 
"go beyond what is immediately present to the senses," and 
thus can never discover the real existence or the relations of 
objects. And so "'tis only causation which produces such 
a connection as to give us assurance, from the existence or 
action of one object, that 'twas followed or preceded by any 
other existence or action." He devotes the whole energy of 
his intellect to the task of showing that we know nothing 
of the nature of the relation between cause and effect ; that 
we know their conjunction within our experience, but not their 
connection. 

In discussing this question, and kindred ones, he finds it 
necessary to explain the nature of belief. " The belief of the 
existence of an object joins no new ideas to those which com- 
pose the idea of the object." What then is the difference 
between belief and incredulity ? It consists solely in the live- 
liness of the former. " We must not be contented with saying 
that the vividness of the idea produces the belief, we must 
maintain that they are individually the same." " The belief 
or assent which always attends the memory and senses is noth- 
ing but the vivacity of those perceptions they represent, and 
this alone distinguishes them from imagination." The theory 
is surely palpably false here, for our imaginations, in which 
there is no faith, are often livelier than our memories, in 
which there is belief. But, by this theory, he would account 
for all our beliefs. He would establish it as a general maxim 
in the science of human nature, that when any impression 
becomes present to us, it not only transports the mind to such 
ideas as are related to it, but likewise communicates to them a 
share of its force and vivacity. " A present impression being 
vivid, conveys its vividness to all the ideas which are associ- 
ated with it by such general laws as those of resemblance, con- 
tiguity, and causation." " A person that has lost a leg or an 
arm by amputation, endeavors, for a long time afterwards, to 
serve himself with them. After the death of any one, 'tis a 
common remark of the whole family, but especially the ser- 
vants, that they can scarce believe him to be dead, but still 
imagine him to be in his v chamber, or in any other place where 
they were accustomed to find him." The explanation may 
seem a very ingenious, but it is a very feeble one. We may 



Art. xix.] HIS THEORY OF CAUSATION. 141 

believe that we saw a particular person yesterday, though we 
have no lively impression or idea regarding him ; and we do 
not believe in the existence of Achilles, though the reading of 
Homer has given us a vivid conception of him. 1 

But this theory is employed to give an explanation of our 

1 J. S. Mill has made a most unwarrantable application of the laws of asso- 
ciation, in accounting for the formation of our higher ideas. He labors to 
derive all our ideas from sensation through association. But sensations — say of 
sounds, smells, colors, and forms, or of pleasure and pain — can never be any 
thing else than sensations, — that is sounds, smells, colors, forms, pleasures or 
pains, — and never can of themselves yield such ideas as those of space and time, 
cause and effect, moral good and moral obligation. But then he gives to asso- 
ciation a sort of chemical power, by which it changes a series of successive or 
contemporaneous ideas into something different from any of the ideas, just as 
oxygen and hydrogen by their union form a third substance, water. He is to 
be met here by showing that the laws of the association are merely the laws of 
the succession of our ideas, and they do not generate a new idea. Repeated 
association may quicken the flow of our ideas, and make several, as it were, 
coalesce into one, or it may weaken some and intensify others, but it cannot 
yield a new element. Even on the supposition that there is (which there is 
not) a chemical power in association to transmute one thing into another, this 
would be a new and different capacity, not in the sensations and associations, 
but superinduced upon them. Mr. Mill's professed evolution of our higher 
ideas out of sensation by association, is a mere jugglery, in which he changes 
the elements without perceiving it, and overlooks the peculiarities of the com- 
posites he would explain. 

He has been guilty of an equal error in very much overlooking the relations 
which the mind of man can discover ; and, so far as he does notice them, in 
giving a very inadequate account of them. In this respect he is far behind 
Hume, who, we have seen, gives a very comprehensive summary of them. 
So far as Mr. Mill treats of them, he (followed by Professor Bain) seems to 
give the mind no other power of comparison than that of observing resem- 
blances and differences. Nor is this his worst error. He confounds the 
judgments of the mind with associations, and thus endeavors, in a plausible 
but superficial way to account for that conviction of necessity which is appealed 
to as a test of fundamental truth. "If we find it," he says, "impossible by 
any trial to separate two ideas, we have all the feeling of necessity the mind 
is capable of " (p. 264). Now there is here the confounding of two things that 
are very different, the association of two ideas, so that the one always calls up 
the other, with the judgment which declares that two things are necessarily 
related. The letter A suggests the letter B ; this is one mental phenomenon : 
we decide that two plus two makes four, and that it cannot be otherwise ; this 
is an entirely different phenomenon. Now it is this necessity of judgment, and 
not the invariable association, that is the test of first truths. When we 
thus show that association cannot produce a new idea, and that judgment, 
especially necessary judgments, are something different from associations, we 
deprive Mr. Mill's theory of the plausibility which has so deceived the London 
critics bred at the English universities, — where, I may take the liberty of 
saying, they would be very much the better of instruction in a sound and sober 
philosophy. 



142 DAVID HUME. [Art. xix. 

belief in the relation of cause and effect. The one having al- 
ways been with the other in our experience, we are led by 
habit, and proceeding on the principle of association, when 
we find the one to look for the other, and thus, too, the effect 
being present, that is an impression, gives its vividness to the 
cause as an associating idea. " The idea of cause and effect is 
derived from experience, which, presenting us with certain 
objects constantly conjoined with each other, produces such a 
habit of surveying them in that relation, that we cannot, with- 
out a sensible violence, survey them in any other." This is his 
explanation of what is implied in efficacy, agency, power, force, 
energy, connection, productive quality. The essence of neces- 
sity is " the propensity which custom produces to pass from 
an object to the idea of its usual attendant." " When any ob- 
ject is presented to it, it immediately conveys to the mind a 
lively idea of that object which is usually found to attend it, 
and this determination forms the necessary connection of these 
objects." His definition of cause is " an object precedent and 
contiguous to another, and so united with it that the idea of 
the one determines the mind to form the idea of the other, 
and the impression of the one to form a more lively idea of 
the other." 

Hume's doctrine is founded on his favorite principle, " that 
all our ideas are copied from our impressions ; " but the neces- 
sary connection of cause and effect cannot be in the impres- 
sion, for " when I cast my eye on the known qualities of objects, 
I immediately discover that the relation of cause and effect 
depends not the least on them." Not being in the impression, 
it cannot be found in the idea. Now it is here, I apprehend, 
that Hume is to be met. I have disputed his theory that 
the mind begins with mere impressions ; it commences with 
the perception or knowledge of objects within itself, and 
without itself. Now, in its primitive perception of objects, it 
knows them as having power ; it knows self as a power, and 
it knows the not-self as a power, — as a power in resisting and 
impressing the self. Here is the impression, if any one will 
call it so (I call it knowledge), that gives rise to the idea which 
may be separated in thought by abstraction, and put in the 
form of a maxim by generalization. 

Unfortunately, as I think, the opponents of Hume have 



Art. xix.] HIS VIEW OF MIND AND BODY. 143 

not always met him at the proper point. They have allowed 
him that we have no original knowledge of power in the ob- 
jects, and having given this entrance to the sceptic, they find 
great difficulty in resisting his farther ravages. Sometimes 
they have endeavored to discover a nexus of some kind between 
the cause and its effect, but have always failed to tell what the 
bond is. Causation is not to be regarded as a connection 
between cause and effect, but a power in the object, that is, 
substance (or objects and substances), acting as the cause to 
produce the effect. Kant labored to oppose the scepticism of 
the Scotchman by supposing that the mind, by its own forms, 
bound together events in its contemplation of them. But 
when he allowed that the power was not in the objects, he 
introduced a more subtle and perilous scepticism than that 
which he sought to overthrow. We avoid this subjective 
idealism by insisting that it is on the bare contemplation of a 
thing becoming, and not by the mere association of ideas and 
custom (which may aid), that we declare that it must have had 
a cause. 

He is now prepared to discuss two questions : " Why we 
attribute a continued existence to objects even when they are 
not present to the senses, and why we suppose them to have 
an existence distinct from the mind and perception ? " He 
shows, as to the first, the senses give us nothing but a present 
perception ; and, as to the second, that our perceptions being 
of ourselves, can never give us the least intimation of any thing 
beyond. He dwells in the usual manner on the acknowledged 
unreality of what have been called the secondary qualities of 
matter, and as we naturally look upon the primary qualities, 
such as motion and solidity, and the secondary qualities, such 
as colors, sound, heat and cold, as alike real, so we must phil- 
osophically consider them as alike unreal. After the manner 
of the times, he rejects the notion that we can immediately 
perceive our bodily frame, and not mere impressions, and that 
we can know both the "objects and ourselves." But whence, 
it is asked, the coherence and constancy of certain impressions ? 
He accounts for it on the principle that the thought, according 
to the laws of association, slides from one impression to others 
with which it has been joined, and reckons them the same, and 
mistakes the succession of images for an identity of objects. 



144 DAVID HUME. [Art. xix. 

The result reached by him is, " All our distinct perceptions 
are distinct existences," and " the mind never perceives any- 
real connection among distinct existences." " What we call 
mind is nothing but a heap or collection of different impres- 
sions united together by certain relations, and supposed, though 
falsely, to be endowed with a perfect simplicity and identity." 
He gives the same account .of what we call matter. He shows 
that having nothing but impressions, we can never, on the 
mere ground of a conjunction which we have never witnessed, 
argue from our perceptions to the existence of external con- 
tinued objects ; and he proves (very conclusively, I think, on 
his assumption), that we could never have any reason to infer 
that the supposed objects resemble our sensations. 1 He now 
draws his sceptical conclusion : " There is a direct and total 
opposition betwixt our reason and our senses, or, more properly 
speaking, betwixt those conclusions which we form from cause 
and effect, and those that persuade us of the continued and 
independent existence of body. When we reason from cause 
and effect, we conclude that neither color, sound, taste, nor 
smell have a continued and independent existence. When 
we exclude these sensible qualities, there remains nothing in 
the universe which has such an existence." 

The question is : How is such a scepticism to be met ? Reid 
opposed it by showing that the sensation leads us intuitively to 
believe in the existence of the external thing, and that the 
states of self, known by consciousness, imply a thinking sub- 

1 Here again, from like premises, J. S. Mill has arrived at much the same 
conclusions. Mind, according to him, is "a series of feelings," with "a belief of 
the permanent possibility of the feelings." He is to be met by showing that 
in every conscious act we know self as existing ; that when we remember, we 
remember self as in some state ; and that, on comparing the former self with 
the present, we declare them to be the same. This implies more than a mere 
series of feelings, or a belief (he does not well know what to make of this belief) 
in possibilities ; it implies a self existing and feeling, now and in time past. 
Again : "Matter may be defined the permanent possibility of sensation." He is 
to be met here by showing that we apprehend matter as an existence external 
and extended, and that we cannot get this idea of extension from mere sensations 
which are not extended. As to the contradiction between the senses and the 
reason, which Hume maintains, Mr. Mill makes the reason and senses say the 
same thing, that we can know nothing whatever of matter except as the "possi- 
bility of sensation," and that it "may be but a mode in which the mind repre- 
sents to itself the possible modifications of the Ego" (p. 189), which Ego is but a 
series of feelings. This conclusion is quite as blank as that reached by Hume. 



Art. xix.] THE TI1E1STIC ARGUMENT. 145 

stance. The more correct statement seems to me to be, that 
we know at once the external objects ; that intuitively we 
know our own frame and objects affecting it ; that we are con- 
scious, not of states arguing a self, but of self in a certain 
state ; and that, on comparing a former self recalled by memory 
and a present self known by consciousness,, we declare them to 
be the same. Kant certainly did not meet the scepticism of 
Hume in a wise or in an effective manner, when he supposed 
that the unity was given to the scattered phenomena by forms 
in the mind. 

It is clear that all the usual psychological arguments for the 
immateriality and immortality of the soul are cut up and 
destroyed by this theory. We cannot speak of the soul as 
either material or spiritual, for we know nothing either of mat- 
ter or spirit except as momentary impressions. " The identity 
which we ascribe to the mind of man is only a fictitious one." 
Identity is nothing really belonging to these different per- 
ceptions, but is merely a quality which we attribute to them 
because of the union of their ideas in the imagination, when 
we reflect upon them. 

His theory of causation undermines the argument for the 
divine existence. He carefully abstains from dwelling on this 
in his great philosophic work, but he expounds it at great 
length, and with all his intellectual power, in his " Dialogues on 
Natural Religion." We know nothing of cause, except that it 
has been observed to be the antecedent of its effect ; when we 
have noticed an occurrence usually preceded by another occur- 
rence, we may on discovering the one look for the other. But 
when we have never seen the events together, we have really 
nothing to guide us in arguing from the one to the other. We 
can argue that a watch implies a watchmaker, for we have 
observed them together ; but never having had any experience 
of the making of a world, we cannot argue that the existence 
of a world implies the existence of a world maker. There is no 
effective way of answering this objection, but by maintaining 
that an effect necessarily implies a cause. It was on this 
ground that he was met by Reid, who argues that traces of 
design in God's works argue an intelligent cause. Kant 
deprived himself of the right to argue in this way, by making 
the mind itself impose the relation of causation on events, 



146 DAVID HUME. [Art. xix. 

so that we cannot argue that there is a corresponding law 
in the things themselves. Hume urges with great force and 
ingenuity, as Kant did after him, that if we are compelled 
to seek for a cause of every object, we must also seek for 
a cause of the Divine Being. This is to be met by showing 
that our intuitive conviction simply requires us to seek for a 
cause of a new occurrence. He argues, as Kant also did after 
him, that the existence of order in the universe could at best 
prove merely a finite and not an infinite cause. The reply is, 
that we must seek for the evidence of the infinity of God in 
the peculiar conviction of the mind in regard to the infinite 
and the perfect. 1 

This may be the most expedient place for stating and exam- 
ining his famous argument against miracles, as advanced in his 
essay on the subject. It is clear that he could not argue, as 
some have done, that a miracle is an impossibility, or that it is 
contrary to the nature of things. He assails not the possibility 
of the occurrence of a miraculous event, but the proof of it. 
Experience being with him the only criterion of truth, it is to 
experience he appeals. He maintains that there has been an 
invariable experience in favor of the uniformity of nature, and 
that a miracle being a violation of a law of nature, can never 
be established by as strong proof as what can be urged 
against it. He then exerts his ingenuity in disparaging the 
evidence usually urged in behalf of miraculous occurrences, by 
showing how apt mankind are to be swayed on these subjects 
by such principles as fear, wonder, and fancy. We are not 

1 Mr. Mill has adopted Hume's doctrine of causation with a few modifications. 
The question is : Has he left to himself or to his followers an argument for the 
divine existence ? He advises the defenders of theism to stick by the argument 
from design, but does not say that it has convinced himself. The advice is a 
sound one ; we should not give up the argument from design because of the 
objections of Kant, which derive their force from the errors of his philosophy. 
Mr. Mill says, that we can " find no difficulty in conceiving that in some one of 
the many firmaments into which sidereal astronomy now divides the universe, 
events may succeed one another at random, without any fixed law" (" Logic," 
b. iii. c. 21). I should like to see an attempt made to construct an argument 
for the divine existence by those who accept this view. Mr. Mill shows that our 
belief in the uniformity of nature is the result of experience. But the uniformity 
of nature is one thing and causation is a different thing. He should be met by 
showing that we have a necessary conviction that every thing that begins to be 
has a cause, and that he has utterly failed in deriving this conviction from sensa- 
tions and associations. 



Art. xix.] THE PASSIONS, 1 47 

sure whether Hume has always been opposed in a wise or 
judicious manner by his opponents on this subject. It is of 
little use showing that there is some sort of original instinct 
leading us to believe in testimony ; for this instinct, if it exists, 
often leads us astray, and we must still go to experience to 
indicate what we are to trust in and what we are to discard. 
But the opponents of Hume were perfectly right when they 
showed, that in maintaining that nature always acted accord- 
ing to certain mundane laws, he was assuming the point 
in dispute. Let us admit that the whole question is to be 
decided by experiential evidence. Let us concede that in 
the present advanced state of science there is ample evidence 
that there is a uniformity in nature ; but then let us place 
alongside of this a counterpart fact, that there is a sufficient 
body of evidence in favor of there being a supernatural system. 
For this purpose let the cumulative proofs in behalf of Chris- 
tianity, external and internal, be adduced ; those derived from 
testimony and from prophecy, and those drawn from the unity 
of design in the revelation of doctrine and morality, and from 
the character of Jesus ; and we shall find that in their consist- 
ency and congruity they are not unlike those which can be 
advanced in behalf of the existence of a natural system. 

In Book Second of his Treatise, Hume treats of the pas- 
sions. It is the most uninteresting part of his writings. The 
reading of it is like travelling over an immense plain, which 
looks inviting at the distance, but in which we find no spots 
of fertility or of historical interest. It looks as if the good- 
humored but phlegmatic man were incapable of discussing the 
nature of the passions. The composition, though clear and 
sustained, is never elevated by bursts of feeling or irradiated 
by gleams of genius. He has a theory to support, and he 
defends it by wiredrawn ingenuity. When he treats of the 
understanding, if he does not establish much truth, he at least 
overthrows venerable error, and we are constrained to admire 
his intellectual energy and courage ; but, in dealing with the 
feelings of our nature, he wastes his strength in rearing a 
baseless fabric, which, so far as I know, no one has ever 
adopted, and no one has been at the trouble to assail. He has 
no proper analysis of man's original springs of action. He 
says only in a general way, that " the chief spring or actuating 



148 DAVID HUME. [Art. xix. 

principle of the human mind is pleasure and pain." He gives 
no psychological account of the place which the idea or appre- 
hension of an object as good or evil, or rather as appetible or 
inappetible, has in all feeling. Of course, all passions are 
according to him impressions, only he calls them reflective 
impressions, to distinguish them from sensations. The re- 
flective impressions are of two kinds, the calm and the violent; 
the first including beauty and deformity, and the latter such 
passions as love and hatred, grief and joy, pride and humility. 
He connects his theory of the passions throughout with his 
theory of the understanding. There are associations among 
the passions, as there are associations among ideas ; only he 
says, that while ideas are associated by resemblance, contiguity, 
and causation, impressions are associated only by resemblance. 
There has as yet been no thorough examination, so it appears 
to me, of the laws of succession of feeling, as distinguished 
from that of ideas ; I am not convinced that the theory of 
Hume, that feelings are associated only by resemblance, is the 
correct one. He draws a distinction between the cause and 
the object of passion. Thus if a man has made a beautiful 
house, the object of the passion is himself, and the cause is 
the beautiful house. The idea of ourselves is always present 
with, and conveys a sensible degree of vivacity to the idea of 
any other object to which we are related ; in short, turns the 
idea into an impression. Some other person is the object of 
love, but the cause of that passion is the relation of that per- 
son to self. Out of this may proceed the desire of happiness 
or misery of others, which he describes " as an arbitrary and 
original instinct implanted in otir nature" — I put the lan- 
guage in italics, as I may have occasion again to refer to it. 
In this way he constructs an elaborate, but by no means clear, 
theory of the passions. He divides them into direct and 
indirect. By direct, he understands such as arise immediately 
from good or evil, that is, from pain or pleasure. He says of 
them : " The direct passions frequently arise from a natural 
impulse or instinct, which is perfectly unaccountable. Of this 
kind is the desire of punishment to our enemies and of happi- 
ness to our friends, hunger, lust, and a few other bodily aj^pe- 
tites," Under the direct, he includes desire, aversion, grief, 
joy, hope, fear, despair, and security. The indirect proceed 



Art. xix.] BEAUTY AND WILL. 149 

from the same principles, but by conjunction with other qual- 
ities ; and he comprehends under them pride, humility, ambition, 
vanity, love, hatred, envy, pity, malice, generosity, with their 
dependents. It may be said of his exposition of the passions 
generally, that he has often seized on important circumstances 
which modify their action, but has altogether failed in his 
explanation of their nature. Thus he has some just remarks 
upon the transition of one idea to another, upon the effects 
thus produced, and upon the predominant passion swallowing 
up the inferior ; but after all we have no proper evolution of 
the psychological process. 

He occasionally refers to beauty, but the account he gives of 
it is very inadequate. " Beauty is such an order and construc- 
tion of parts, as either by the primary constitution of our nat- 
ure, or by custom, or by caprice, is fitted to give a pleasure 
and satisfaction to our souls." "The conveniency of a house, 
the fertility of a field, the strength of a horse, the capacity, se- 
curity, and swift-sailing of a vessel, form the principal beauty 
of these several objects." It is clear that the aesthetic tastes 
of one satisfied with such a theory could not have been keen, 
and we do not wonder to find that in the letters written during 
his travels, he never makes a single allusion to a fine statue or 
painting. 

The account which he gives of the will is still more de- 
fective. " The will is the internal impression we feel and are 
conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion 
of our body." Surely we may have will in regard to our men- 
tal operations as well as in regard to our bodily motions. The 
will, he says, is an impression, but surely it is an impression of 
a very peculiar kind ; and he should have inquired, which he 
has not done, into its nature, when he would have seen that it 
possesses an essential freedom. As not perceiving this, he has 
left nothing to save man from being driven on by an iron ne- 
cessity. 

In Book Third, he treats of morals, and starts his utilitarian - 
theory, which, however, he develops more fully, and in a livelier, 
more pointed, and ornate manner, in his essay, " An Inquiry 
concerning the Principles of Morals." He says of this work, 
that it is " of all my writings, historical, philosophical, or lit- 
erary, incomparably the best." In respect of practical influ- 



150 DAVID HUME. [Art. xix. 

ence, it has certainly been the most important. By his 
speculative doubts in regard to the operations of the under- 
standing, he has furnished a gymnastic to metaphysicians 
ever since his time ; but by his theory of virtue he has 
swayed belief and practice. 

He shows that we cannot distinguish between good and evil 
by reason alone, defining reason as the discovery of truth or false- 
hood, and truth and falsehood as consisting in the agreement or 
disagreement, either to the real relation of ideas, or to real ex- 
istence and matter of fact. Taking reason in this sense, it 
certainly cannot be said to discern the morally good. But 
then it may be maintained that the mind has a power of dis- 
cerning moral good and evil analogous to the reason which 
distinguishes truth and falsehood, and all that he could urge 
in opposition would be, that such a view is inconsistent with his 
theory of impressions and ideas. It is by no means clear 
what is the faculty or feeling to which he allots the func- 
tion of perceiving and approving the morally good. Sometimes 
he seems to make man a selfish being, swayed only by motives 
of pleasure or pain ; and in this view virtue is to be regarded 
as good, because associated directly or indirectly with the 
pleasure it would bring to ourselves. But in other places he 
calls in a " benevolent sentiment, leading us to approve what 
is useful." Hume's general theory might certainly seem op- 
posed to every thing innate, and yet, in criticising Locke, he is 
obliged to say : " I should desire to know what can be meant by 
asserting that self-love or resentment of injuries, or passion 
between the sexes, is not innate." We have already quoted 
passages in which he appeals to instincts. He says elsewhere, 
" The mind, by an original instinct, tends to unite itself with 
the good, and avoid the evil." At times he seems to adhere to 
the theory of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, as to the existence 
of a moral sense. " The mind of man is so formed by nature, 
that upon the appearance of certain characters, dispositions, 
and actions, it immediately feels the sentiment of approbation 
or blame." He tells us expressly that he is inclined to think 
it probable that the final sentence in regard to moral excel- 
lence "depends on some internal sense or feeling which nature 
has made universal in the whole species." I believe that we 
cannot account for the ideas in the mind except by calling in 



Art. xix] HIS ACCOUNT OF VIRTUE. 151 

such a faculty or feeling ; and it was his business, as an ex- 
perimental inquirer, to ascertain all that is in this power, and 
to determine its mode of operation and its laws. But such an 
investigation would have overthrown his whole theory, meta- 
physical as well as ethical. 

According to Hume, virtue consists in the agreeable and 
useful. "Vice and virtue may be compared to sounds, colors, 
heat and cold, which, according to modern philosophy, are not 
qualities in objects, but perceptions in the mind." "Virtue is 
distinguished by the pleasure, and vice by the pain, that any 
action, sentiment, or character gives us by the mere view and 
contemplation." This theory goes a step farther than that of 
Hutcheson in the same direction. Hutcheson placed virtue in 
benevolence, thereby making the intention of the agent neces- 
sary to virtue ; whereas Hume does not regard it as necessary 
that it should be voluntary, and requires us to look merely to 
the act and its tendency. His definition might lead one to 
think that an easy road or a pleasant carriage should be re- 
garded as virtuous. But he will not admit that because an 
inanimate object may be useful as well as a man, that there- 
fore it ought also to merit the appellation of virtuous ; for he 
says : " The sentiments excited by utility are in the two cases 
very different, and the one is mixed with affection, esteem, ap- 
probation, and not the other." This language, more particu- 
larly the phrases "esteem" and "approbation," might have 
led him to discover that there is a peculiar judgment or senti- 
ment attached to virtuous action not produced by mere utility. 

He easily satisfies himself that he can show that benevolence 
is a virtue because it is so agreeable and useful ; but he never 
faces the real difficulty, which is to account for the sense of 
obligation which we feel, and the obligation actually lying upon 
us, to do good to others. 1 He strives to show that justice is 
commended by us because of its beneficial tendency. Justice 
can have a meaning, he maintains, only in regard to society 
and arrangements made with others. True, the giving to 
every one his due, implies beings to whom the due is to be 

1 In his " Utilitarianism," Mr. Mill has endeavored to defend the theory from 
the objections commonly taken to it. But he has utterly failed in his attempt to 
derive our idea and conviction of moral good from mere sensations and asso- 
ciations of sensation. 



I5 2 DAVID HUME. [Art. xix. 

given ; but the due arises from the relation in which we stand 
to these beings. Thus the first man and woman having chil- 
dren, had duties to discharge towards them as soon as they 
were born, and independent of any promise. He labors to 
prove that our obligation to keep a promise arises from utility. 
" Fidelity is no natural virtue, and promises have no force an- 
tecedent to human conventions." True, a promise implies a 
person to whom it is made, but, once made, the obligation is 
complete. 

This leads us at once to the fundamental objections which 
may be taken to the utilitarian theory. Whence the obligation 
lying on us to promote the happiness of others ? to give others 
their due ? to keep our promises ? From their utility, it is an- 
swered. But why are we bound to attend to what is useful ? is 
the question that immediately occurs ; why the reproach that 
follows, and which justifies itself when we have failed to keep 
our word ? These questionings bring us to a justice which 
guards conventions, to a law which enjoins love. 

The practical morality sanctioned by the system, and actually 
recommended by Hume, excludes all the higher virtues and 
loftier graces. The adoration of a Supreme Being, and love to 
him, are represented as superstition. He has no God to sanc- 
tion the moral law, and no judgment day at which men have 
to give in an account. Repentance has and can have no place 
in a system which has no fixed law and no conscience. Hu- 
mility, of which he treats at great length, is disparaged. The 
stern virtues of justice, of self-sacrifice, of zeal in a good cause, 
of faithfulness in denouncing evil, and of courage in stemming 
the tide of error and corruption, these are often so imme- 
diately disagreeable, that their ultimate utility will never be 
perceived except by those who are swayed by a higher princi- 
ple. It is certain that they were not valued by Hume, who 
speaks of them as superstition and bigotry, and characterizes 
those who practise them as zealots and fanatics. His view of 
the marriage relation was of a loose and flexible character, and 
did not profess to discountenance the evil practices of his time. 
"A man in conjoining himself to a woman is bound to her ac- 
cording to the terms of his engagement : in begetting children, 
he is bound by all the ties of nature and humanity to provide 
for their sustenance and education. When he has performed 



Art. xix.] THE AIM OF HIS PHILOSOPHY. 153 

these two parts of duty, no one can reproach him with injustice 
or injury." Not acknowledging a God bestowing the gift of 
life, and requiring us to give an account of the use we make 
of it, and setting no value on courage in difficulties, he argues 
that a man may take away his life when it is no longer useful. 

The state of society which he aimed at producing is thus 
described : " But what philosophical truths can be more ad- 
vantageous to society than those here delivered, which repre- 
sent virtue in all her genuine and most engaging charms, and 
make us approach her with ease, familiarity, and affection ? 
The dismal dress falls off with which many divines, and some 
philosophers, have covered her, and nothing appears but gen- 
tleness, humanity, beneficence, affability ; nay, even at proper 
intervals play, frolic, and gayety. She talks not of useless aus- 
terities and rigors, suffering and self-denial." People have often 
speculated as to what Hume would have taught had he been 
elected professor of moral philosophy in Edinburgh. I be- 
lieve he would have expounded a utilitarian theory, ending in 
the recommendation of the pleasant social virtues ; speaking 
always respectfully of the Divine Being, but leaving his exist- 
ence an unsettled question. 

And what, it may be asked, is the conclusion to which he 
wishes to bring us by his whole philosophy ? I am not sure 
that he has confessed this to himself. Sometimes it looks as 
if his sublime aim was to expose the unsatisfactory condition 
of philosophy, in order to impel thinkers to conduct their re- 
searches in a new and more satisfactory manner. " If, in order 
to answer the doubts started, new principles of philosophy 
must be laid, are not these doubts themselves very useful ? 
Are they not preferable to blind and ignorant assent ? I hope 
I can answer my own doubts ; but, if I could not, is it to be 
wondered at ? " I verily believe that this was one of the alter- 
natives he loved to place before him to justify his scepticism. 
" I am apt," he says, in writing to Hutcheson, " to suspect 
in general that most of my reasonings will be more useful 
in furnishing hints, and exciting people's curiosity, than as 
containing any principles that will augment the stock of 
knowledge that must pass to future ages." But I suspect 
that the settled conviction reached by him was that no cer- 
tainty could be attained in speculative philosophy ; he was sure 



154 DAVID HUME. [Art. xix. 

that it had not been attained in time past. The tone of the 
introduction to his great work is : " There is nothing which is 
not the subject of debate, and in which men of learning are 
not of contrary opinions. If truth be at all within the reach 
of human capacity, it is certain it must be very deep and 
abstruse ; and to hope we shall arrive at it without pains, 
while the greatest geniuses have failed with the utmost pains, 
must certainly be esteemed sufficiently vain and presumptu- 
ous." As being thus deep, he feels as if the great body of 
mankind need not trouble themselves much about it. He 
seems at times complacently to contemplate this as the issue 
to which he would drive mankind ; for he sees at once that if 
men become convinced that they cannot reach certainty in 
such speculations, they will give up inquiry. " For nothing is 
more certain than that despair has almost the same effect 
upon us as enjoyment, and that we are no sooner acquainted 
with the impossibility of satisfying any desire than the desire 
itself vanishes ; " and he thinks it a satisfactory condition of 
things when men discover the impossibility of making any 
farther progress, and make a free confession of their igno- 
rance. Considered in this light, Hume's philosophy, in its 
results, may be considered as an anticipation of the positive 
school of M. Comte, which in the British section of it ap- 
proaches much nearer the position of Hume than most people 
are aware of. 

He allows that man should, as indeed he must, follow his 
natural impulses, and the lessons of experience, as far as this 
world is concerned. But he will grant nothing more. He thus 
closes his inquiry into the understanding : " When we trace 
up the human understanding to its first principles, we find it 
to lead us into such sentiments as seem to turn into ridicule 
all our past pains and industry, and to discourage us from 
future inquiries." " The understanding, when it acts alone, 
and according to its general principles, entirely subverts itself, 
and leaves not the lowest degree of confidence in any proposi- 
tion, either in philosophy or common life." In common life 
this scepticism meets with insuperable barriers, which we 
should not try to overcome. But it is different with phil- 
osophical, and, we may add, theological truths, which are 
supported solely by speculative considerations. In these de- 



Art. xix.] HIS JUSTIFICATION OF IT. 155 

partments we may discuss and doubt as we please, without 
doing any injury. "What injury can ever come from ingeni- 
ous reasoning and inquiry ? The worst speculative sceptic I 
ever knew was a much better man than the best superstitious 
devotee." Those who think they can reach truth in these 
matters are at liberty to cherish their conviction, provided 
always that they do not thereby disturb their neighbors. But 
the time is coming, and already wise men see that it is coming, 
when mankind will not concern themselves with such specu- 
lative questions, or will engage in them only as a gymnastic 
to the intellect, or as a means of showing that ultimate 
truth is unattainable by man. 

It was, I believe, on such grounds as these that Hume 
justified himself in his sceptical doubts, and his sceptical 
solution of these doubts. He thought they might stir up 
inquiry on subjects on which no truth had been reached ; 
and tend to confound the dogmatism and restrain the dis- 
putations in philosophy, and the fanaticism and superstition in 
religion, which had wrought such mischief ; and prepare the 
way for a reign of universal toleration. As to religious belief, 
it could be supported only by speculative arguments, derived 
from an absolute causation, or from miracles which cannot stand 
a searching investigation. So far as men follow a moderate and 
tolerant religion, Hume was rather pleased with them, and he 
evidently shrank from the fanatical atheism avowed by some 
of the more advanced followers of the system in France. If 
there be a world to come, it will clear up itself when it comes ; 
and, meanwhile, there are duties which we must perform, from 
a regard to ourselves and our relation to others. There had 
hitherto been no science of metaphysics ; but there could be a 
science of ethics (and also of politics) founded on the circum- 
stance, that certain acts are found to be agreeable and useful 
to ourselves and others. 

It is in this way we are to reconcile certain seeming incon- 
sistencies in his character. He had no settled faith in any 
religion, yet he went to church, at least at times ; he wished 
his servant to go to church, and he mingled in the counsels 
of the Church of Scotland. He never committed himself to 
deism or atheism. He wrapped up his thoughts on these 
subjects in his bosom, perhaps with some feeble hope that he 



156 DAVID HUME. [Art. xix. 

might get light ; but the cloud seems only to have settled 
more deeply upon him. When the pert Mrs. Mallet met him 
one night at an assembly, and boldly accosted him, " Mr. 
Hume, give me leave to introduce myself to you : we deists 
ought to know each other," " Madam," replied he, " I am no 
deist : I do not style myself so, neither do I desire to be 
known by that appellation." He did not avow himself an 
atheist in Paris. Sir Samuel Romilly has detailed a char- 
acteristic anecdote told of him by Diderot. He dined with a 
large company at the house of Baron D'Holbach. "As for 
atheists," said Hume, " I do not believe one exists : I have 
never seen one." " You have been a little unfortunate," said the 
baron : " here you are with seventeen of them at the table for 
the first time." We may suppose there was some sincerity in 
the statement he made : " I have surely endeavored to refute 
the sceptic with all the force of which I am master, and my 
refutation must be allowed to be sincere because drawn from 
the capital principles of my system," only he was not prepared 
to review his system. In writing to Elliott, he says he wishes 
to make Cleanthes, the theist, the hero of the dialogue. Adam 
Ferguson told his son, who reports the incident, that one clear 
and beautiful night, when they were walking home together, 
Hume suddenly stopped, looked up to the starry sky, and said, 
" O Adam, can any one contemplate the wonders of that firma- 
ment, and not believe there is a God ! " Dr. Carlyle tells us, 
that when his mother died he was found in deepest affliction 
and a flood of tears, upon which Mr. Boyle said to him that his 
uncommon grief arose from his having thrown off the princi- 
ples of religion ; to which he replied : " Though I throw out 
my speculations to entertain the learned and metaphysical 
world, yet in other things I do not think so differently from 
the rest of the world as you imagine." In whatever way we 
may account for it, there was evidently a consistency in the 
character of Hume which made him respected by his worldly 
friends, who thought a man might be good, though he had no 
godliness. 

The all-important question is, How is this spirit to be cor- 
rected, this error to be met ? 

First. It must be firmly maintained that an honest mind can 
spontaneously attain such truth, secular, moral, and religious, 



Art. xix.] HOW HE IS TO BE MET. I 57 

as is needful to its peace and progress. This truth does not lie 
deep down in some pit, which can be reached only by deep 
digging, or whence it can be drawn only by the cords of length- 
ened ratiocination ; it lies on the surface, and may be seen by im- 
mediate perception, or picked up by brief discursive processes. 
By this spontaneous exercise of our faculties and common 
observation, we reach the existence of God, the accountability 
of man, and a day of judgment. By such an easy method we 
rise to a belief in the Word of God, and in the spiritual verities 
there set forth. We should hold that man reaches all this by 
as natural a procedure as that by which he comes to know 
what path he should take in the common affairs of this life. 
No doubt he will at times meet with difficulties, but this only 
as he may be beset by perplexities in the affairs of this world ; 
and in the one case, as in the other, the sincere mind has com- 
monly enough of light to guide it. 

Secondly. It should be held that he who undermines the 
fundamental truth spontaneously discovered, is doing an injury 
to humanity. Scepticism, as Hume delights to show, can 
produce no mischief in the common secular affairs of life, 
because there are circumstances which keep men right in 
spite of their principles, or want of principles. But it is very 
different in respect of those questions which fall to be dis- 
cussed in higher ethics and theology. A man will not be 
tempted by any sophistry to doubt the connection of cause and 
effect when he is thirsty and sees a cup of water before him ; 
in such a case he will put forth his hand and take it, knowing 
that the beverage will refresh him. But he may be led by a 
wretched sophistry to deny the necessary relation of cause and 
effect when it would lead him upward from God's works to 
God himself, or induce him to seek peace in Him. Hence the 
importance of not allowing fundamental truth to be assailed ; 
not because the attack will have any influence on the prac- 
tical affairs of this life, but because it may hold back and 
damp our higher aspirations, moral and religious. Hume 
hoped that his scepticism might soften asperities, but he 
did not wish to think that any bad influences could follow 
from it. On one occasion he was told of a banker's clerk in 
Edinburgh, of good reputation, who had eloped with a sum 
of money ; and the philosopher wondered greatly what could 



153 DAVID HUME. [Art. xix. 

induce such a man thus to incur, for an inconsiderable sum, 
such an amount of guilt and infamy. " I can easily account 
for it," said John Home, "from the nature of his studies, 
and the kind of books he was in the habit of reading." " What 
were they," said the philosopher. He was greatly annoyed 
when told, Boston's " Fourfold State," and Hume's " Essays." 
Certainly the youth must have been in a perplexed state who 
had been converted from a belief in the "Fourfold State" by 
Hume's " Essays," or who was hesitating between them. 

Thirdly. The philosopher must undertake a more important 
work. He must inquire into the nature of fundamental truth ; 
he must endeavor to unfold the mental powers that discover 
it, and to expound their mode of operation, and their laws. 
He cannot indeed prove first truths by mediate evidence, 
for if they were capable of probation they could not be first 
truths ; but he can show that they are first truths perceived 
by immediate cognition of the objects, and in no need of 
external support. He must as far as possible clear up the 
difficulties and perplexities in which the discussions in regard 
to them have become involved. In particular, he must show 
that while the reflex consideration of the ultimate principles 
of knowledge often lands us in difficulties, the principles them- 
selves never lead us into positive contradictions ; and that, 
therefore, while we allow that the human faculties are limited, 
we cannot admit that they are deceptive. This is what has 
been attempted by one philosopher after another since the 
days of Hume. 

In fact, all later philosophy springs directly or indirectly 
from the thorough-going examination to which the Scotch scep- 
tic had subjected received truths. It has been the aim of the 
Scottish school, as modified and developed by Reid, to throw 
back the scepticism of Hume. Reid tells us that he once 
believed the received doctrine of ideas so firmly as to embrace 
the whole of Berkeley's system along with it, till, on discover- 
ing the consequences to which it had been driven by Hume, 
he was led to review the whole theory and abandon it. Kant 
declares that he was roused from his dogmatic slumbers by the 
assaults of the Scottish sceptic, and was thus impelled to the 
task of repelling the attack. It is scarcely necessary to say 
that all other philosophies, deserving the name, which have 



Art. xix.] HOW MET BY REID AND KANT. 159 

originated within the last hundred years, have ramified directly 
or indirectly from the Scottish and the German schools ; 
one school, the French school of M. Cousin, seeking to com- 
bine the two. 

It is interesting to observe the respective ways in which 
the Scottish and the German metaphysician sought to meet 
the great sceptic. It is evident that his assaults might be 
repelled at one or other of two places : either where the foe 
has entered, or after he has made certain advances. That the 
mind begins with impressions and goes on to ideas, which are 
mere reproductions of impressions, — this is the fundamental 
principle of Hume. Now this may be denied, I think should 
be denied. On what ground, we ask, does he allow the exist- 
ence of impressions and ideas ? When he answers, we can 
show him that on the same ground he must admit more ; that 
he must allow that the mind has convictions in regard to its 
own existence, and the existence of external objects, and per- 
ceptions of moral goodness. But again, he may be met at the 
farther stages of his progress. He asserts that the mind can 
reach no truth except such as it gets from experience. It may 
be shown in opposition that it has an original furniture in the 
shape of tendencies and laws which lead to and guarantee 
necessary and eternal truth. 

It is interesting to observe that Reid met him at both these 
points. Reid made a very careful inquiry into the nature of 
the senses as inlets of knowledge ; and showed that accom- 
panying the sensation there is always an intuitive perception 
of an external world. He showed too, though he did not make 
so much of it as he might, that consciousness is a mental fac- 
ulty and a source of knowledge. He farther met the sceptic 
at the more advanced point, and proved that the mind has a 
primitive reason or common-sense which decides at once that 
things are so and so ; that every effect, for instance, must 
have a cause. I am not of opinion that Reid has thoroughly 
cleared up these subjects, that he has detected all that is in 
the senses, that he has unfolded fully the laws of intuition and 
its mode of operation ; but he has established enough to repel 
the assaults of the sceptic. 

Reid possessed many of the best qualities of his countrymen ; 
in particular, he was shrewd and independent : but he was not 



160 DA VID HUME. [Art. xix. 

endowed with great powers of logical analysis. On the other 
hand, Kant was strong where Reid was weak ; that is, in power 
of dissection and construction : but was deficient where Reid 
excelled, in patient observation. He neglected, as I think 
most unfortunately, to oppose the fundamental principle of 
Hume. He allows that the mind begins with phenomena in 
the sense of appearances, and these phenomena are just the 
impressions of Hume. But if it be allowed that in the original 
inlet we have only impressions or phenomena, it never can be 
satisfactorily shown how we can reach reality by any compo- 
sition or decomposition of these. Kant exercised his vast 
powers in meeting Hume at the other point ; that is, in show- 
ing that there is an a priori furniture in the mind, independent 
of all experience. But what he built with the one hand he 
took down with the other. For these a priori forms could not, 
in his theory, guarantee any objective reality. He accepts 
the conclusion of Hume, and allows that the speculative rea- 
son could not guide to truth ; he goes so far as to maintain 
that it lands us in contradictions. This philosophy, intended 
to overthrow the scepticism of Hume, has thus led to a scep- 
ticism which has had a more extensive sway than that of the 
cold Scotchman ever had. He endeavored to save himself 
from such an issue by calling in a practical reason, which 
guaranteed as its corollaries the freedom and immortality of 
the soul, and the Divine existence. But it was immediately 
asked how it could be shown that the practical reason does 
not deceive, after it has been conceded that the speculative 
reason leads to illusion ? Thus the insecure mound, raised 
with such labor to stem the flood, only aggravated the outburst 
and overflow as it gave way. 

Sir W. Hamilton sought to unite Reid and Kant, but was 
never able to weld thoroughly together the principles which 
he took from two such different sources. His doctrines of 
the relativity of knowledge, and of causation as a mere impo- 
tency of the mind, have prepared the way for a doctrine 
of nescience now largely espoused. Some of his pupils have 
betaken themselves to a sort of confused Berkeleyanism min- 
gled with Kantism, which will furnish an easy passage to the 
nescient theory in so shrewd a nation as Scotland, and among 
so practical a people as the English. Mr. Mill, in his examina- 



Art. xx.] " SCOT'S MAGAZINE." 161 

tion of Hamilton's Philosophy, has brought us to a Humism 
joined to Comtism. This is the dismal creed provided for 
those who choose to follow the negative criticisms of the day 
in philosophy and theology. What we need in these circum- 
stances is a new Thomas Reid, not to do over again the work 
which the common-sense philosopher did, but a corresponding 
service in this age to what he did in his time. 



XX.— BOOKS ADVERTISED IN "SCOT'S MAGAZINE." 

The "Scot's Magazine" begins in 1739. The works mentioned and the 
topics discussed will give us a better idea of the times, than any thing else 
that can be produced. In January is advertised " A Treatise of Human 
Nature," the work that revolutionized all modern philosophy. For years, 
we have papers about Whitefield, who revolutionized religion in England, 
and had a mighty influence in Scotland and America. The magazine has 
a series of papers, lasting for years, under the head of " Common Sense. 1 ' 
In March, there is an advertisement of a " Second Volume of Common- 
Sense Letters collected," showing that we have no need to go to remote 
quarters to find the source from which Reid and the Aberdeen school got 
the phrase, " common sense," which had been in constant use since the 
time of Shaftesbury (p. 31). It is curious to notice that, in January, come- 
dians are prosecuted before the Court of Session, and, in February, are 
found guilty, and "decerned for the penalties in the late Act against 
strollers." In March, there is an advertisement, "A View of the Necessi- 
tarian or Best Scheme, freed from the Objections of M. Crouzaz in his 
Examinations of Pope's 'Essay on Man. 1 " In June, "The Necessity of 
Revelation, 1 ' by Archibald Campbell, pp. 45, 3^. in sheets, showing that reve- 
lation needed to be defended. In October, an attack on Campbell's book, 
and, in December, a reply by Campbell. In October, "A Treatise of An- 
cient Painting," by Dr. Turnbull, 4/. 4s. in sheets. In February, 1740, 
"The Principles of Moral Philosophy;" in December, "A Methodical 
System of Universal Law ; " and, in May, " A Curious Collection of fifty 
Ancient Paintings," il. 8j\, all by Turnbull, showing that there was a taste 
in the country for ethical and aesthetic discussions, — the failure of Turn- 
bull's works proving that it was not to be gratified by the excellent common- 
place of that author. In 1740, Simson, whose views in regard to the 
Trinity raised such discussion, passes away from this world, after having 
lived in retirement since his suspension in 1728. In May, we have "The 
Principles and Connection of Natural and Revealed Religion," by A. Ash- 
ley Sykes ; and " The Divine Authority of the Old and New Testament 
asserted," by J. Leland, D.D , 2$s. ; and, in July, " Discourses concerning 



162 ADAM SMITH. [Art. xxi. 

the Being and Natural Perfections of God," by J. Abernethy, M.A., 5.5-. 6d. \ 
all showing that there were men ready to defend natural and revealed relig- 
ion on sound, sensible principles. That deism is alive, appears from May, 
when " Physico, Theologico, Philosophico, Moral Disquisition concerning 
Human Nature, Free Agency, Moral Government, and Divine Providence," 
by T. Morgan, M.D., 5^. 6d., appears. In June, " Remarks on the Inquiry 
into the Nature of the Human Soul," ij-. In December, among preferments, 
Adam Smith, Comptroller of the Customs at Kirkcaldy, Inspector-General 
of the Customs ; showing that a competent man was being prepared to discuss 
political economy. In April, 1741, " The Temper, Character, and Duty of 
a Minister of the Gospel," a sermon by William Leechman, M.A., 6d. ; indi- 
cating the introduction of Moderatism into the Church of Scotland in its most 
plausible form, denying no orthodox doctrine, and yet recommending, in 
graceful language, only the truths of natural religion, and the common moral- 
ities of life, — an evidence that the attacks of deistical writers had made many 
ashamed of the deeper doctrines of Scripture. In January, 1744, there is 
an abstract of the associate presbytery for renewing the Covenants, dated 
at Stirling, Dec. 23, 1743, "complaining of several immoralities, and the 
repealing of the penal statutes against witches. The penal statutes against 
witches have been repealed by the parliament, contrary to the express law 
of God : by which a holy God may be provoked in a way of righteous judg- 
ment, to leave those who are already ensnared to be hardened more and 
more, and to permit Satan to tempt and seduce others to the same wicked 
and dangerous snares." The above list shows clearly an age of great intel- 
lectual activity, a strong tendency to philosophical discussion among 
Scotchmen, a vigorous attack on Christianity, a respectable defence of it 
and of natural religion, a revival of evangelical religion under Whitefield, 
and a strong love of it on the part of the common people, along with the 
appearance of intemperance and strolling players. It was in the midst of 
this ferment that Hume's work appeared, to shake all that was thought to 
be established in philosophy and in natural religion. 



XXL — ADAM SMITH} 

His is perhaps the most illustrious name appearing in these 
sketches. But he has a higher reputation in political economy 
than in metaphysics, in which latter department he comes before 
us as the author of a theory of moral sentiments, and of very 
interesting fragmentary histories of certain departments of 
philosophy. 

1 "Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith," by Dugald Stewart ; 
"Life and Writings of Adam Smith," anonymous, but understood to be by J. R. 
M'Culloch ; "Literary and Characteristical Lives," by William Smellie, &c. 



Art. xxi.] HIS EARLY LIFE. 163 

He was born June 5, 1723, in the "lang toun" of Kirkcaldy, 
which lies on the opposite side of the Frith of Forth from 
Edinburgh. His father was comptroller of the customs there ; 
and his mother, a benignant Christian lady, watched over 
his sickly childhood with tenderness, which he repaid her by 
a corresponding kindness for the long period of sixty years, 
for the greater part of which the two lived together. When 
about three years old he was stolen by a party of tinkers, 
who took him to the woods, but was fortunately rescued. 
We should have liked to hear him, in his later years, spec- 
ulating as to what might have been his place in the gypsy 
camp had he been brought up among them. We can con- 
ceive that, while fashioning spoons out of horns and mend- 
ing tin dishes, his comprehensive head would have been 
spinning a theory of the organization of the tribe. But it 
would have been beyond the capacity even of the explorer 
of the nature and causes of national wealth to determine what 
he himself or any other might have become if trained in 
such different circumstances. He seems to have received 
an excellent education in his native place, at a school which 
reared a number of eminent men. Unable from his weak 
bodily constitution to join in active amusements, he gave him- 
self to reading, and, even at that early age, was noted for 
speaking to himself when alone, and falling into absent fits in 
company. At the premature age of fourteen, he went to the 
University of Glasgow, where his favorite studies seem to 
have been mathematics and natural philosophy. But before 
he left he attended the lectures of Hutcheson, whom he greatly 
admired, and who, no doubt, helped to direct him to philo- 
sophic pursuits. From Glasgow he went, on a salary pro- 
vided by the Snell Foundation, to Baliol College, Oxford, where 
he resided for seven years, and seems to have given himself 
specially to the studies of polite literature. " He employed 
himself frequently in the practice of translation (particularly 
from the French), with a view to the improvement of his own 
style." Every one knows that the French authors were the 
models to which the greater part of the Scottish writers looked 
at that time. Hume and Smith entertained a feeling of ad- 
miration for French prose and poetry, but had no appreciation 
(as Adam Ferguson remarked) of Shakespeare or Milton. 



1 64 ADAM SMITH. [Art. xxi. 

His original destination had been to the Church of England, 
but he did not find the profession to suit him. When at Ox- 
ford, the heads of the college found him reading Hume's 
" Treatise of Human Nature," and they seized the work, and 
reprimanded the youth. ("Life," by M'Culloch.) On leaving Ox- 
ford he spent two years at Kirkcaldy, uncertain as to what he 
might do. In 1748 he removed to Edinburgh, where he de- 
livered lectures on rhetoric and belles-lettres ; the commence- 
ment, I believe, of that instruction in polite literature and 
English composition which has ever since been a distinguish- 
ing feature of the collegiate education in Scotland. In 175 1 
he was elected professor of logic, and in 1752 professor of 
moral philosophy, in the University of Glasgow. In the former, 
after an exposition, apparently brief (as we might expect from 
the spirit of the times), of the ancient logic, he devoted the 
rest of his time to rhetoric and belles-lettres. In the latter he 
divided his course into four parts: 1. Natural theology; 2. 
Ethics, unfolding the views he afterwards published in his 
" Theory of Moral Sentiments ; " 3. Justice, that part of mo- 
rality which can be expressed in precise rules ; 4. Political sci- 
ence in which he delivered the thoughts and observations which 
were afterwards embodied in his great work, " The Wealth of 
Nations." In the later years of his Glasgow life, he expanded 
this last part more and more. An eminent pupil, Dr. Millar, 
afterwards professor of law in the university, describes him 
as a lecturer. " In delivering his lectures, he trusted almost 
entirely to extemporary elocution. His manner, though not 
graceful, was plain and unaffected ; and, as he seemed to be 
always interested in the subject, he never failed to interest his 
hearers. Each discourse consisted commonly of several dis- 
tinct propositions, which he successively endeavored to prove 
and illustrate. These propositions, when announced in general 
terms, had, from their extent, not unfrequently something of the 
air of a paradox. In his attempts to explain them, he often 
appeared at first not to be sufficiently possessed of the subject, 
and spoke with some hesitation. As he advanced, however, the 
matter seemed to crowd upon him : his manner became warm 
and animated, and his expression easy and fluent. In points 
susceptible of controversy, you could easily discover that he 
secretly conceived an opposition to his opinions, and that he 



Art. xxi.] HIS GLASGOW LIFE. 165 

was led upon this account to support them with greater energy 
and vehemence. By the fulness and variety of his illustrations, 
the subject gradually swelled in his hands, and acquired a di- 
mension which, without a tedious repetition of the same views, 
was calculated to seize the attention of his audience, and to af- 
ford them pleasure, as well as instruction, in following the same 
object through all the diversity of shades and aspects in which 
it was presented, and afterwards in tracing it backwards to that 
original proposition or general truth from which this beautiful 
train of speculation had proceeded." 

The thirteen years he spent in this office, he looked back 
upon as the happiest in his life. He published, in 1759, his 
"Theory of Moral Sentiments," to which was appended an 
article on Johnson's Dictionary for the then " Edinburgh Re- 
view." While in Glasgow he collected a large body of the 
observations and facts which he afterwards embodied in his 
immortal work. He was stimulated and aided in these studies 
by his attending a weekly club founded by Provost Cochran, 
a Glasgow merchant, who furnished him with much valuable 
information on mercantile subjects. 

In 1763 he gave up his chair in Glasgow, and, at the invita- 
tion of Mr. Charles Townsend, became travelling tutor to the 
young Duke of Buccleuch. One wonders, in these times, at 
so intellectual a man abandoning the influential position he 
held in Glasgow to become the teacher of a single youth, 
however eminent in station. But it was undoubtedly a great 
advantage to Smith that he was thus enabled to see more of 
mankind and of the world, and was brought into immediate 
contact with eminent men of kindred tastes and pursuits in 
F ranee. Proceeding to France in the spring of 1764, he and 
his pupil spent eighteen months at Toulouse, and lived on 
terms of intimacy with some of the principal members of their 
parliament, and is supposed to have gathered there further 
materials for his great projected work. On leaving this place, 
he took an extensive tour in the south of France ; spent two 
months at Geneva ; and then went to Paris, and, having recom- 
mendations from Hume, he enjoyed the society of such men 
as Turgot, Quesnay, Morellet, Necker, D'Alembert, Helvetius, 
Marmontel, and Madame Riccoboni. He is supposed to have de- 
rived special benefit from his intercourse with Turgot and Ques- 



1 66 ADAM SMITH. [Art. xxi. 

nay, who were engaged in political studies similar to his own. 
In October, 1766, he returned to Great Britain, and spent the 
next ten years with the mother whom he so much loved, in Kirk- 
caldy. There are traditions of David Hume visiting him there 
from time to time, and of their holding earnest conversations 
on questions of political economy, and, it is supposed, of relig- 
ion, as they walked on the sands of the Frith of Forth. From 
this retreat issued, in 1776, his " Inquiry into the Nature and 
Causes of the Wealth of Nations," — the work which made 
political economy a science. 

In 1778 he was appointed, at the request of the Duke of 
Buccleuch, one of the commissioners of his majesty's customs 
in Scotland, and removed to Edinburgh, taking his mother 
with him : it is scarcely necessary to mention that he con- 
tinued all his life a bachelor. Here he spent the last twelve 
years of his life. Henceforth he became an object of curiosity 
to all people of literary culture ; and his person was scrutinized, 
as he walked the streets, by the curious, and his peculiar habits 
reported. Many a youth, studying in Edinburgh, was proud to 
relate in after years that he had seen him, — a fine gentleman of 
the old school, a little above the ordinary size, with a manly coun- 
tenance lighted by large gray eyes, wearing a cap, a long, wide 
great-coat, breeches, and shoebuckles ; and they remarked that, 
when " he walked, his head had a gentle motion from side 
to side, and his body, at every step, a rolling or vermicular 
motion, as if he meant to alter his direction, or even turn back. 
In the street, or elsewhere, he always carried his cane on his 
shoulder, as a soldier does his musket." (" Lives," by Smellie.) 
Dr. Carlyle gives a graphic picture of his manner in com- 
pany. " Adam Smith was far superior to Hume in conversa- 
tional talents. In that of public speaking they were equal. 
David never tried it ; and I never heard Adam but once, which 
was at the first meeting of the Select Society, when he 
opened up the design of the meeting. His voice was harsh, 
and enunciation thick, approaching to stammering. His con- 
versation was not colloquial, but like lecturing, in which, I 
have been told, he was not deficient, especially when he grew 
warm. He was the most absent man in company that I ever saw ; 
moving his lips, and talking with himself, and smiling, in the 
midst of large companies. If you awaked him from his rev- 



Art. xxi.] HIS PHILOSOPHY, 167 

erie and- made him attend to the subject of conversation, he 
immediately began to harangue, and never stopped till he told 
you all he knew about it, with the utmost philosophical in- 
genuity. He knew nothing of characters, and yet was ready 
to draw them on the slightest invitation. But when you 
checked him, or doubted, he retracted with the utmost ease, 
and contradicted all he had been saying." Carlyle tells us 
that " David Hume, like Smith, had no discernment at all of 
character." 

Dugald Stewart mentions it as an interesting circumstance 
that all Hume's works were written with his own hands, whereas 
Smith dictated to a secretary as he walked up and down his 
apartment, and hints that we may perceive, in the different 
styles of these two classical writers, the effects of these differ- 
ent modes of study : as he wrote with his own pen, Hume 
gave a greater terseness and compactness to his style, whereas 
Smith, in dictating to an amanuensis, kept himself more in 
sympathy with his reader, and was more disposed, like a speaker, 
to flow and fluency. It may have been from the same cir- 
cumstance that Hume wrote with great rapidity, whereas 
Smith composed as slowly, and with as great difficulty, at 
last as at first. 

In Edinburgh, his studies were much interrupted by his 
official duties, and often — as he mentions in a letter written 
on his being elected by the students lord rector of his old 
University — did he cast a longing eye back upon the aca- 
demic leisure he enjoyed in Glasgow. Like most men of 
high aims, he regretted, when he saw death approaching, that 
he had done so little. " I meant to have done more, and there 
are materials in my papers of which I could have made a great 
deal. But that is now out of the question." Shortly before 
his death, he gave orders to destroy all his manuscripts, which 
were supposed to contain his lectures on rhetoric, on natural 
religion, and on jurisprudence. He died in July, 1790. 

Let us turn to his philosophy. His mind was essentially a 
reflecting one, a self-revolving one. He was always thinking, 
and talking to himself, gathering facts, forming theories, and 
seeking out events to confirm them ; thus building up a system 
which was always ingenious, sometimes too ingenious, but 



168 ADAM SMITH. [Art. xxi. 

ever worthy of being weighed. His " Theory of Moral Senti- 
ments " has commonly been a favorite with students, because 
of the eloquence of its language, modelled after the best phil- 
osophic writers of ancient Rome and modern France, and of 
the fertility of his resources in confirming his positions from 
his varied observation and reading. But his theory has gained 
the assent of few, and has often been prescribed by professors 
as a subject on which to exercise the critical acumen of their 
pupils. Adam Smith is always a discursive writer, and in the 
work now before us he wanders like a river amidst luxuriant 
banks, and it is not easy to define his course. Dugald Stewart 
in his " Memoir " has given the clearest account of it I have 
seen ; and I mean to make free use of what he has written, in 
the shorter abstract which I submit. 

According to the common moral theories, men first judge 
of their own actions, and then those of their neighbors. Smith 
reverses this, and maintains that the primary objects of our 
moral perceptions are the actions of other men. We put our- 
selves in their position, and partake with them in their affec- 
tions by what he calls sympathy or fellow-feeling, which is the 
grand principle of his system. We thus judge of their con- 
duct, and then apply to ourselves the decisions which we have 
passed on our neighbors, and which we may conceive they 
would pronounce on us. Our moral judgments, both with re- 
spect to others and ourselves, include two perceptions : first, 
of conduct as right or wrong ; and, secondly, of the merit or 
demerit of the agent. When the spectator of another man's 
situation, upon bringing home to himself all its various cir- 
cumstances, feels himself affected in the same manner with the 
person principally concerned, he approves of the affection or 
passion of this person as just, proper, and suitable to its object. 
We judge of the propriety of the affection of another only by 
its coincidence with that which we feel when we put ourselves 
in the same circumstances, and the perception of this coinci- 
dence is the foundation of the perception of moral obligation. 
Now this is a very circuitous way of gendering our moral ideas 
and judgments. Whether we look to ourselves or others, the 
mind pronounces a judgment upon the act, — say a deed of 
benevolence or cruelty, — and must do so according to some law 
which is the true basis of morality. We are more likely to 



Art. xxi.] THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS. 169 

pronounce first upon ourselves. But it may be acknowledged 
that it does help us in forming a correct judgment, to put our- 
selves in the position of others, and inquire how they would 
view us ; and hence the important rule : " Whatsoever ye would 
that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them." This 
is the element of truth in Smith's theory. In illustrating his 
views, he is particularly happy in showing how circumstances 
affect our moral judgments ; that, for example, when there is 
no envy in the case, our sympathy with joy is much stronger 
than our sympathy with sorrow, and that in consequence it is 
more easy to obtain the approbation of mankind in prosperity 
than in adversity. From the same principle He traces the 
origin of ambition, or of the desire of rank and pre-eminence ; 
the great object of which passion is to attain that situation 
which sets a man most in view of general sympathy and 
attention, and gives an easy empire over the affections of 
others. 

Having thus shown how we come to a sense of propriety 
(as he calls moral excellence), he proceeds to analyze our sense 
of merit and demerit, which have always a respect to the ef- 
fect which the .affection tends to produce. The only actions 
which appear to us deserving of reward are actions of a bene- 
ficial tendency, proceeding from proper motives, with which 
we can sympathize ; the only actions which seem to us to 
deserve punishment are actions of a hurtful tendency, proceed- 
ing from improper motives. He accounts for our sense of jus- 
tice by the circumstance that, if I wish to secure the sympathy 
and approbation of my fellow-men, — represented by Smith 
as the strongest desire of our natures, — it is necessary for me 
to regard my happiness not in that light in which it appears to 
myself, but that in which it appears to mankind in general, — 
as if in all justice there was not an inflexible rule for judging of 
the conduct both of ourselves and others. 

He then shows how our sense of duty comes to be formed 
in consequence of an application to ourselves of the judgments 
we have previously passed on others. In doing this we lay 
down rules of morality which become universally applicable. 
He allows to Hume that every thing approved of by the mind 
is useful and agreeable ; but he insists that it is not the view 
of this utility which is either the first or principal source of 
moral approbation. 



170 ADAM SMITH. [Art. xxi. 

Most people have felt that this theory is too artificial, — is too 
ingenious to be true. It contains some elements of truth, but 
they are not put in their proper place ; and the fabric is left 
without a sure foundation, — virtue has no other foundation 
than the sympathy and approbation of men. The beauty of 
the building lies not in the structure as a whole, but in por- 
tions, often subordinate portions of it. His illustrations are 
abundant, and always felicitous ; and many of them show a very 
nice and delicate perception of the peculiarities of human nat- 
ure. We see this very specially in his chapter " Of the Influ- 
ence of Custom and Fashion upon our Notions of Beauty and 
Deformity," — perhaps the most valuable part of his work, as 
being that in which he sketches the various moral systems, such 
as those of the Stoics and Epicureans. Here he shows erudi- 
tion, and enters thoroughly into the spirit of the authors and 
their times. The work will continue to be read for its style 
and these adjuncts, by persons who set no value on the theory 
which he expounds. 

Smith intended to write a connected history of the liberal 
sciences and elegant arts, but found the plan far too extensive. 
He has left us only a few fragments, which were published 
posthumously by Joseph Black and James Hutton. In these 
he discusses, always ingeniously, such topics as the nature 
of the imitation which takes place in what are called the 
imitative arts ; the affinity between music, dancing, and poetry ; 
the affinity between English and Italian verses. But the most 
valuable of these papers, are three on the principles which lead 
and direct philosophical inquiries, illustrated by the history 
of astronomy, of ancient physics, of ancient logic and meta- 
physics, and one on the external senses. 

The three philosophico-historical essays exhibit all the pecu- 
liarities of his mind : they are theoretical, they inquire into 
causes, and display an enlarged acquaintance with the sciences. 
He begins with showing that wonder called forth by the new 
and singular, surprise excited by what is unexpected, and 
admiration raised by what is great and beautiful, these — and 
not any expectation of advantage, or the love of truth for its 
own sake — are the principles which prompt mankind to try 
to discover the concealed connections that unite the various 
appearances of nature, which give rise to the study of phi- 



Art. xxi.] OF THE EXTERNAL SENSES. I/l 

losophy, which is defined as the science of the connecting 
principles of nature. " Nature, after the largest expenditure 
that common observation can acquire, seems to abound with 
events which appear solitary and incoherent with all that go 
before them, which therefore disturb the easy movement of 
the imagination ; and philosophy aims at discovering the 
invisible chains which bind together all the disjointed ob- 
jects. Hence, in astronomy, the invention of eccentric spheres, 
of epicycles, and of the revolution of the centres of the eccentric 
spheres ; in physics, the four elements ; and in metaphysics and 
logic, species, essence, and ideas, — all these give the imagi- 
nation something to rest on." These motives have no doubt 
helped to create a taste for science, and often given it a partic- 
ular direction ; but many other causes have been in operation. 
It appears to me that, had Smith been able to devote as much 
time to a history of philosophy as he did to the " Wealth of 
Nations," and been in circumstances to review his theories 
from time to time, he might have written a better work than 
any produced in that century. No doubt he would at times 
have added a thought of his own to the account given of a 
philosophic opinion ; but, following out his favorite principle of 
sympathy, he would always have put himself en rapport with 
the authors and their times. 

His paper " Of the External Senses " is characterized by 
much sound sense and a profound study of the subject. He 
goes over the senses one by one. He has a glimpse of the 
important distinction — afterwards carefully elaborated by Sir 
William Hamilton, and Miiller the physiologist — between the 
perception of the organ and of objects beyond the body. Tast- 
ing, smelling, hearing, and certain sensations of touch, are alto- 
gether in the organ, and nowhere else but in the organ. But 
in regard to touching, " the thing which presses and resists I 
feel as something altogether different from these affections, — 
as external to my hand, and as altogether independent of it." 
He represents the objects of touch as solidity, and those modi- 
fications of solidity which we consider as essential to it and 
inseparable from it, — solid extension, figure, divisibility, and 
mobility." He defines the impenetrability of matter as " the 
absolute impossibility that two solid, resisting substances 
should occupy the same place at the same time." He ex- 



172 , ADAM SMITH. [Art. xxi. 

pounds a doctrine in regard to the so-called secondary quali- 
ties of matter ; " or, to speak more properly, these four classes, 
of sensations : heat and cold, taste, smell, and sound being felt 
not as resisting or pressing on the organ, but as in the organ." 
He says that they u are not naturally perceived as external and 
independent substances, but as mere affections of the organ, 
and what can exist nowhere but in the organ." This is per- 
haps a more philosophical account than that given by Locke, 
Reid, or Hamilton, who proceed on the distinction drawn 
between the primary and secondary qualities of matter. In 
regard to sight, he says the objects of it are color, and those 
modifications of color which in the same manner we con- 
sider as essential to it and inseparable from it, — colored ex- 
tension, figure, divisibility, and mobility." The tangible world 
has three dimensions, — length, breadth, and depth ; the visible 
world, only two, — length and breadth. He recognizes Berke- 
ley's theory of vision as " one of the finest examples of- philo- 
sophical analysis that is to be found either in our own or in any 
other language ; " and he quotes the Chiselden case. He notices 
the fact that, antecedent to all experience, the young of at 
least the greater part of animals possess some instinctive 
perception of distance. "The young partridge, almost as soon 
as it comes from the shell, runs about among the long grass 
and corn." He is inclined to think that the young of the 
human race may have some instinctive perception of the same 
kind, which does not come forth or manifest itself so strongly 
as in the lower animals, because mankind have greater aids 
from intelligence and education. He thinks that other senses, 
" antecedently to all observation and experience, may obscurely 
suggest a vague notion of some external thing which excites 
it. The smell not only excites the appetite, but directs to the 
object which can alone gratify that appetite. But, by suggest- 
ing the direction towards that object, the smell must necessarily 
give some notion of distance and externality, which are necessa- 
rily involved in the idea of direction." These hints are wor- 
thy of being carried out : they will certainly not be despised by 
those who in our day are studying hereditary instinct. 

It does not consist with our purpose to give an account of 
his labors in political economy. I may remark, however, that 
in his work, and in every other, there is an omitted chapter, 



Art. xxn.] HENRY HOME (LORD KAMES). 1 73 

which will require to be written by some one before the 
science is completed. In speaking of soil, labor, money, rent, 
and other external agents, there is no searching estimate of 
the internal motives which impel men to the acquisition and 
distribution of wealth. Some writers, such as James Mill, 
represent all men as swayed only by self-love ; others dwell 
fondly on such principles as a taste for literature or the fine 
arts : but there has been no discriminating computation of the 
springs of action, general and special, which lead men to make 
acquisitions, and which have produced different results in 
different ages and nations ; for instance, to one form of civiliza- 
tion in Italy or in France, to others in Germany or in Scot- 
land. Smith might have been tempted to set too high a value 
on certain influences which were favorites with him, but he 
was eminently fitted to begin the undertaking ; and had he done 
so, he would have left us admirable illustrations of the power 
of motives actually swaying mankind. 



XXII. — HENRY HOME {LORD KAMES)} 

He was the son of George Home, of Karnes, a country gen- 
tleman of small fortune, in Berwickshire, married to a grand- 
daughter of Principal Baillie. He was born in 1696, and was 
educated at home, under a private tutor. It was in after life 
that he devoted himself to the study of Greek and Latin, to 
which he added mathematics, natural philosophy, logic, ethics, 
and metaphysics. He was never at any university. He showed 
an early taste for philosophical speculation. It seems that he 
came in contact with Andrew Baxter, who was tutor to a son 
of Mr. Hay, of Drumelzier, and lived at that time at Dunse 
Castle, within a few miles of Karnes, and the two had a cor- 
respondence ; Home arguing that motion was not a single effect, 
but a continued succession of effects, each requiring a new or a 
successive repetition of the cause. to produce it. Like so many 
others in the same age, he had a thrust at Clarke's "Demonstra- 

1 " Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Hon. Henry Home, of Kames," 
by Alex. Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee, 2 vols., 1S07. 



174 HENRY HOME (LORD KAMES). [Art. xxii. 

tion of the Existence of God," and wrote, in 1723, a letter to 
the doctor. Already he is drawing up arguments against 
liberty of will. Having chosen the law as his profession, he 
was called to the bar 1723-24. As a pleader he began with a 
very short and distinct statement of the facts of the cause and 
a plain enunciation of the question of law thence arising, 
abandoning all the weaker points of the case. He excelled 
more in making an opening statement than in reply. We 
have a picture of his habits. He rose at five or six, and spent 
his morning in preparation for the business of the court. In 
the forenoon he was at the Court of Session, which, at that 
time, rose soon after mid-day. He did not go much out to 
dinner, as he needed all his time for business and study. In 
the evening, if he had leisure, he joined the ladies in the draw- 
ing-room, or took part in a game of cards, or might be seen 
at the concert or the assembly room. "The evening was gener- 
ally closed by a small domestic party, where a few of his intimate 
friends assembled, for the most part without invitation ; found 
a plain but elegant little supper ; and where, enlivened often by 
some of Mrs. Home's female acquaintance, the hours were 
passed in the most rational enjoyment of sensible and spirited 
conversation, and easy social mirth, till after midnight." 

Throughout his life he published various works on law and 
jurisprudence ; beginning, in 1728, with a folio volume of " Re- 
markable Decisions of the Court of Session" from 17 16 down 
to that period. In 1752 he was appointed a judge of the 
Court of Session, by the title of Lord Karnes. 

But his tastes ever led him towards metaphysical specula- 
tion. From 1727 he had been acquainted with David Hume, 
and he carefully studied his writings as they were published. 
It seems he had dissuaded the sceptic from publishing his 
" Philosophical Essays," and he felt himself called to oppose 
what he believed to be the extreme views there propounded. 
This gave rise, in 1 75 1, to a work which produced a great 
noise in his own day, " Essays on the Principles of Morality 
and Natural Religion." It was published under the name of 
" Sopho." He shows that man is influenced by a great num- 
ber and variety of principles, such as self-love, benevolence, sym- 
pathy, and utility, consonance to the divine will ; and that his 
actions are most frequently the combined result of the op- 



Art. xxii.] HIS PHILOSOPHIC PRINCIPLES. 17$ 

posite springs, tempering and restraining each other's powers. 
He shows that man has, as a separate principle, in his nat- 
ure and constitution, a moral feeling or conscience, the func- 
tion of which is to judge with unerring rectitude of all his 
motives to action, and direct his conduct to one great and 
beautiful end, — the utmost happiness of his nature. In ex- 
pounding these views, he examines Hume's theory, and shows 
that it annihilates all real distinction between right and wrong 
in human actions, and makes our preference of one or other 
depend on the fluctuating opinions of men in respect to the 
general good. In particular, he opposes Hume's view of justice, 
and shows that the idea of property is coeval with society, and 
that its violation is universally attended with a feeling of a 
breach of duty, which is the sentiment of justice. He sets 
himself specially to oppose Hume's attempt to undermine the 
arguments in behalf of the Divine Existence, 

In developing his moral and esthetic views, in this and in 
other works, he enunciates his metaphysical principles. He 
maintains that man can acquire intuitive knowledge from a single 
act of perception. " It is an undoubted truth that man has an 
original feeling or consciousness of himself and of his ex- 
istence." He maintains (" History of Man,") that there is a 
sense by which we perceive the truth of many propositions : 
such as that every thing which begins to exist must have a 
cause ; that every effect adapted to some end or purpose pro- 
ceeds from a designing cause ; and that every effect adapted to 
a good end or purpose proceeds from a designing and benevolent 
cause. A multitude of axioms in every science, particularly 
in mathematics, are equally perceived to be true. By a pecul- 
iar sense we know that there is a Deity. From all this it is 
evident that he stood up for intuitive principles. 

There must surely be truth in the account he gives of 
power ; so different from that of Locke on the one hand, and 
that of the high a priori philosophers on the other. " Every 
action we perceive gives a notion of power ; for a productive 
cause is implied in every action or event, and the very idea 
of a cause comprehends the power of producing its effects. 
Let us only reflect on the perception we have when we see a 
stone thrown into the air out of one's hand." "As I discover 
power in external objects by the eye, so I discover power in 



1/6 HENRY HOME (LORD KAMES). [Art. xxn. 

my mind by an internal sense." " This feeling is involved 
in the very perception of the action, without taking in either 
reason or experience." " We cannot discover power in any ob- 
ject as we discover the object itself, merely by intuition ; but 
the moment an alteration is produced by any object, we per- 
ceive that the object has a power to produce that alteration, 
which leads us to denominate the one a cause and the 
other an effect." It is generally acknowledged that we know 
objects within and without us only by their properties ; but 
what are properties but powers, which must thus be known 
intuitively with the objects that possess them. 

But the doctrine which startled the public was that of philo- 
sophical necessity, as expounded and defended by him. It is a 
circumstance worthy of being noted that this doctrine was upheld 
by three men, who arose about the same period and in much the 
same district of country, — David Dudgeon, David Hume, and 
Henry Home ; it looks as if it were the residuum left by the 
doctrine of predestination, when the flowing waters of the stream 
have been dried up by an arid period. " With respect to instinc- 
tive actions, no person, I presume, thinks that there is any 
freedom ; an infant applies to the nipple, and a bird builds a 
nest, no less necessarily than a stone falls to the ground. With 
respect to voluntary actions done in order to produce some 
effect, the necessity is the same, though less apparent at first 
view. The external action is determined by the will ; the will 
is determined by desire ; and desire, by what is agreeable or 
disagreeable. Here is a chain of causes and effects, not one 
link of which is arbitrary, or under command of the agent. He 
cannot will but according to his desire ; he cannot desire but 
according to what is agreeable or disagreeable in the objects 
perceived. Nor do these qualities depend on the inclination or 
fancy: he has no power to make a beautiful woman appear 
ugly, nor to make a rotten carcase smell sweetly." " Thus, with 
regard to human conduct, there is a chain of laws established 
by nature, no one link of which is left arbitrary. By that wise 
system man is made accountable; by it he is made a fit subject 
for divine and human government ; by it persons of sagacity 
foresee the conduct of others ; and by it the presence of the 
Deity with respect to human actions is clearly established." 
He founds the responsibility of man upon this very doctrine. 



Art. xxii.] HIS OPPONENTS. iyy 

"The final cause of this branch of our nature is admirable. 
If the necessary influence of motives had the effect either to 
lessen the merit of a virtuous action, or the demerit of a crime, 
morality would be totally unhinged." In regard to liberty, man 
acts with the conviction of his being a free agent, and is quite 
as much accountable as if he were truly free. The answer to 
all this is, that man has an intuition in regard to his possessing 
freedom quite as deep and ineradicable as his intuition about 
cause and effect. If we attend to the latter of these, and ad- 
here to it, as Home does, we should equally hold by the other. 
The friends of religion, unenlightened and enlightened, felt 
at once that there was something here repugnant to all that 
they had been led to believe about God and man ; and 
Henry Home came to be put in the same class with David 
Hume, to whom he was in many respects opposed. In 1753, 
there appeared " An Estimate of the Profit and Loss of Re- 
ligion, illustrated with References to Essays on Morality and 
Natural Religion." The author was Rev. George Anderson, 
who had been an army officer, and was now chaplain to Wat- 
son's Hospital in Edinburgh, and who wrote some tracts 
against the stage, and a " Remonstrance against Bolingbroke's 
Philosophical Religion." He is described, by Home's biog- 
rapher, as " a man of a bold spirit and irascible temperament, 
and considerable learning." This gave rise to other pamphlets, 
as " A Letter to the Author of a late Book entitled an 4 Esti- 
mate of the Profit and Loss of Religion.'" Anderson sets him- 
self in opposition to those who say that Christianity is not 
founded on argument, and to Sopho, Hume, and Hutcheson. 
" Feelings being so uncertain and variable, it is most ridiculous 
to found upon them a law so important and extensive as is the law 
of nature." He prefers the ground taken by Clarke and Cumber- 
land. As to the scheme of necessity, it is no other than that of 
Collins. " That Sopho's (Home's) principles serve the cause of 
atheism will be plain enough to any who duly consider the con- 
sequences of his scheme of necessity, which excludes a provi- 
dence and binds up the Almighty in the same chain of fate with 
all other intelligent beings." 1 There appeared in 1755 "An An- 

1 There appeared " Some late Opinions concerning the Foundation of Moral- 
ity examined, in a Letter to a Friend," London, 1753. The author says of Home : 
" His merit is great, were it only in stating so clearly the sentiment of duty or 

12 



178 HENRY HOME (LORD KAMES). [Art. xxii. 

alysis of the Moral and Religious Sentiments contained in 
the Writings of Sopho and David Hume, Esq., addressed to the 
Consideration of the Reverend and Honorable Members of the 
General Assembly. 1 The author denounces Home as maintain- 
ing that man is a mere machine, under an irresistible necessity 
in all his actions, and yet, " though man be thus necessarily de- 
termined in all his actions, yet does he believe himself free, God 
having planted in his nature this deceitful feeling of liberty," — 
this deceitful feeling being the only foundation of virtue. He 
argues that from this doctrine it follows, as a necessary conse- 
quence, that there can be no sin or moral evil in the world. 2 As 
to Hume, he is charged with making all distinction betwixt vir- 
tue and vice as merely imaginary : "Adultery is very lawful, but 
sometimes not expedient." This letter was met by a pamphlet, 
" Observations on the Analysis," generally attributed to Blair, 
" who is believed likewise to have lent his aid to the composi- 
tion of a formal reply made by Mr. Home himself, under the 
title of "Objections against the 'Essays on Morality and Natural 
Religion' examined, 1756." 

moral obligation, and distinguishing it from the sentiment of simple moral obliga- 
tion." The peculiarity of this sentiment, as expressed by the words "ought" 
and "should," our author distinctly explains, and shows how it is "to be dis- 
tinguished from simple approbation by the sanction of self-condemnation or 
remorse." He says of Hume, that it is "his error from the beginning to the end 
to have overlooked the innate feelings of duty, — that authority which conscience 
carries in itself, prescribing certain virtues as a law or rule upon which alone 
morality can be founded and ascertained." "Mr. Hutcheson led the way, by re- 
solving all the several virtues into benevolence, as our author has done into util- 
ity, which, in his sense of it, is much the same." 

1 It is said that Home has been confuted by " the smart and sensible author of 
the 'Estimate of the Profit and Loss of Religion,' and in the modest and elegant 
'Delineation of Morality' (Balfour). Two other authors have distinguished 
themselves against the particular parts of the scheme ; viz., Rev. Mr. Adams, a 
clergyman of the Church of England, in his answer to the 'Essay on Miracles,' 
and Dr. John Stewart in his very masterly reply to the 'Essay on Motion.' " 

2 It is proper to state that in his third edition (1779) Home says, on farther 
reflection he has modified some of his opinions. He gives up the position that 
"some of our moral feelings and emotions must be founded on a delusion." He 
now asserts that the notion we have of being able to act against motives "is sug- 
gested by the irregular influence of passion, and that we never have it in our cool 
moments ; consequently it is not a delusion of nature, but of passion only." He 
thinks that he thus escapes the position that virtue in any measure rests on the 
foundation of any natural feelings being a delusion. But, in avoiding one diffi- 
culty, he only falls into another ; for it is in our moments of cool reflection that 
we adhere most resolutely to the conviction that we have an essential freedom. 



Art. xxn.] BEFORE THE CHURCH COURTS. 179 

In all this we have an able and legitimate discussion. But 
the opponents of the rising scepticism resorted to other and 
more doubtful steps. Henry Home, it is presumed, was a mem- 
ber of the Church of Scotland, and it would have been quite 
within the province of that church to summon him before it, 
and inquire into the opinions which he was believed to be 
propagating. Over David Hume, it is clear that the church had 
no jurisdiction. But the Church of Scotland claimed to be the 
guardian of religion in the country, and to have an authority 
to prevent the circulation of error. So a motion was made in 
the committee of overtures of the General Assembly that the 
body should take into their consideration how far it was proper 
to call before them and censure the authors of infidel books. 
" There is one person, styling himself David Hume, Esq., hath 
arrived at such a degree of boldness as publicly to avow him- 
self the author of books containing the most rude and open at- 
tacks on the glorious gospel of Christ, and principles evidently 
subversive even of natural religion and the foundations of 
morality, if not establishing direct atheism : therefore, the 
Assembly appoint the following persons as a committee to 
inquire into the writings of this author, to call him before 
them, and prepare the matter for the next General Assembly." 
There was a keen debate in the committee for two days. It 
was moved in opposition, " that although all the members have a 
just abhorrence of any principles tending to infidelity or to the 
prejudice of our holy religion; yet, on account of certain cir- 
cumstances in this case, they drop the overture, because it 
would not, in their judgment, serve the purpose of edification." 
The question being put, "transmit the overture to the Assembly 
or not," it passed in the negative by a majority of fifty to seven- 
teen votes. After this, Mr. Anderson gave in a petition and 
complaint to the Presbytery of Edinburgh against the printer 
and publisher of the " Essays on the Principles of Morality and 
Natural Religion," requiring that the presbytery should sum- 
mon them to appear before them and declare the name of the 
author of that work, that he might be censured according to 
the law of the gospel and the practice of this and all other 
well-governed churches." The defenders appeared by counsel. 
Meanwhile Mr. Anderson was summoned away by death from 
the scene. *The case, however, goes on to a decision on the 



180 HENRY HOME (LORD KAMES). [Abt. xxii. 

merits, and the complaint is rejected. These incidents give 
us a more vivid picture of the times than any generalized state- 
ments. It is evidently the good function of the rising Mod- 
erate party in the church to restrain the intemperate zeal 
of those who would lay restraint on liberty of thought 
and writing, who would claim for the church a power not 
committed to it, and meet error with other weapons than 
argument. 

Meanwhile there are able thinkers preparing to meet the 
scepticism both of Hume and Home, by well-established philo- 
sophic principles. We shall see that Reid and James Gregory, 
in particular, came forth to defend the doctrine of the free- 
dom of the will. A curious cross-fight was produced at this 
stage by the introduction into Scotland of Edwards' " Treatise 
on the Will." In the pamphlet published in defence of Home, 
it is urged that, " among the list of subscribers to Edwards' book 
are many members of this church ; and it was dispersed last 
year in this city by the most zealous friends to religion and 
true Calvinism." It is clear that Home and his friends wished 
to shelter themselves under the Calvinism of the Church of 
Scotland ; and the pamphlet quotes Calvin, Turretin, and Pictet. 
It might have been urged in reply that Calvin stands up for an 
essential freedom of the will, possessed by all responsible 
beings ; and that the reformers generally, in holding by a slavery 
of the will, meant a slavery produced by the fall of man and by 
sin. As to Edwards' doctrine, it is a metaphysical one not 
before the mind of the reformers ; and it is so explained and 
illustrated by the author as to make it have a very different 
aspect and practical tendency from that propounded by the 
Scottish necessarians. 

The " Essays on Morality " was the work of Home that pro- 
duced the greatest sensation. It was followed by other philo- 
sophical works. In 1761, he published his "Introduction to 
the Art of Thinking," in which shrewd metaphysics and prac- 
tical remarks are grafted on the old logic. For several years 
he had meditated an extensive work on the principles of criti- 
cism, which would inquire into the causes of that pleasure 
which is derived from the production of poetry, painting, 
sculpture, music, and architecture. The work appeared in 
1762, under the title of " Elements of Criticism." It is grace- 



Art. xxii.] HIS WORKS. 181 

fully written : it treats of all the subjects usually discussed in 
books of rhetoric, and shows an extensive reading in the great 
classical writers of ancient and modern times. He professes 
to found the whole upon a philosophic basis. But his analysis 
of the mental principles involved does not seem to me to be 
very searching or profound. What is the use of telling us, 
" What is now said about the production of emotion or passion 
resolves into a very simple proposition, that we love what is 
agreeable and hate what is disagreeable " ? He does not follow 
the Scottish metaphysicians in resolving beauty into association 
of ideas. He discovers a beauty that is intrinsic as well as a 
relative beauty. 

For years he was collecting materials for a work on man, 
which appeared in 1774 under the title of " Sketches of the 
History of Man." This work is meant to describe the prog- 
ress made by man, in respect of language, food, commerce, the 
arts, science, government, morality, and religion. He is 
inclined to think that, as there are different climates, so there 
are different species of men fitted for these climates, and 
argues that we cannot account for the differences of mankind 
by climate or by external agencies. He would believe that 
there must have been am original difference of languages ; but, 
yielding to the Scriptures, he accounts for the diversities by the 
confusion of tongues at Babel. He is fond of discovering every- 
where a final cause on the part of God, and a progress on the 
part of man. He has collected what seems a wide induction 
of facts ; but there is a great want of what Bacon insists on as 
a necessary part of all legitimate induction, — " the necessary 
rejections and exclusions." 

He was married to Miss Drummond, by whom he became 
possessed of one of the most beautiful places in Scotland, Blair 
Drummond, — on the banks of the Teith, half way between hill 
and dale, — in the south of Perthshire. Home was one of the 
earliest of those agricultural improvers who became very 
numerous, from this time onward, for an age or two among 
those lawyers of Edinburgh who possessed landed estates. 
He took a lead first at Kames, and then at Blair Drummond, 
in summer-fallow, and in raising green crops and sown grass. 
His great agricultural work, which made him famous all over 
Scotland, consisted in clearing the moss of Kincardine, which 



182 HENRY HOME (LORD KAMES). [Art. xxii. 

extended four miles in length and one or two miles in breadth, 
and was covered with turf, eight or nine feet in thickness, and 
underneath which was a rich soil. He effected this by giving 
the land for a time to moss-planters, who floated away the turf 
by means of ditches which he dug. He was a leading member 
of the Board of Trustees for the Encouragement of the Fish- 
eries, Arts, and Manufactures of Scotland, and of the Commis- 
sion for the Management of Forfeited Estates, the rents of which 
were to be applied to the improvement of the highlands and 
islands of Scotland. By means of these boards he did much to 
stimulate the industry of Scotland. It is asserted that he did 
more than any man in his time in encouraging the introduction 
of " new modes and instruments of industry, the enclosure and 
culture of wastes and moors, the rearing of forest timber, the 
draining and cultivation of moss lands, the raising and spinning 
of flax, the growth and storing of winter fodder for cattle, the 
improvement of the breed of sheep, and the manufacture of 
coarse woollen stuffs." 

In his old age he published " Loose Hints on Education.'* 
He thought that religion should form a main branch of educa- 
tion even in the earliest period of infancy, and that the parents 
or preceptor should acquaint the child with the fundamental 
doctrines of revealed religion. The common opinion of him 
was, that he must be a man devoid of all religion. But a cler- 
gyman writes " I have heard him mention the light of immor- 
tality as an excellence peculiar to the doctrine of Christ. He 
gave unqualified praise to Butler's 'Analogy/ which is a defence 
of revealed as well as of natural religion. He was regular in 
his attendance upon public worship ; and during my abode with 
him he had divine worship in his family every evening." It 
is interesting to notice that he defends the Scottish view of the 
sabbath. " This consideration leads me necessarily to condemn 
a practice authorized among Christians, with very few excep- 
tions ; that of abandoning to diversion and merriment what 
remains of Sunday after public worship, parties of pleasure, 
dancing, gaming, any thing that trifles away the time with- 
out a serious thought ; as if the purpose were to cancel every 
virtuous impression made at public worship." (" Sketches of 
the History of Man," B. III.) 



Art. xxiii.] AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY. 183 

In his person he was tall and of a thin and slender make. 
His portrait shows a high, marked brow ; a long nose ; and a 
shrewd, humorous face, — altogether a strong-marked counte- 
nance. " In his manners there was a frankness amounting to 
bluntness, and in his conversation a humorous playfulness." 
He died Dec. 27, 1782, in the eighty -seventh year of his age. 



XXIII. — AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY. — JOHN 
WITHERSPOON. 

America was now reaching such a settled condition that reflective thought 
could make its appearance. Underneath the Puritan action and self-sacri- 
fice, there was a Puritan faith which required men to judge and reason. 
American philosophy put forth at that time its greatest representative. 
Jonathan Edwards was born in Connecticut, in 1703 ; was a tutor in Yale 
in 1724; was pastor and missionary from 1726 to 1757; and died Presi- 
dent of Princeton College, in 1758. From his very childhood he pondered 
the profoundest subjects, and penetrated as far as — at times farther, some 
think, than — human thought could carry him. Possessed of no great variety 
of reading, he reached his very definite opinions, by revolving every sub- 
ject in his own mind. I am inclined to think that his opinions might have 
been modified, had he been brought more fully into contact and collision 
with other thinkers. His "Freedom of the Will " is the acutest work 
ever written on that perplexing subject ; but many think that he has over- 
looked an essential freedom in the mind, acknowledged by Calvin, Owen, 
and the great Calvinistic divines, and revealed by consciousness. He is 
known more as a theologian than a philosopher ; but the fact is, his meta- 
physics, always along with his deep spiritual insight, are the valuable 
element in his divinity. Contemporaneously with Berkeley, he arrives at 
a doctrine of power and of body, — not the same with that of the ideal bishop, 
but coming close to it, and perhaps of a more consistently philosophic 
structure. Cause he explains to be " that, after or upon the existence 
of which, or its existence after such a manner, the existence of another 
thing follows. The connection between these two existences, or between 
the cause and effect, is what is called power." "When we say that grass 
is green, all that we can mean is, that, in a constant course, when we see 
grass, the idea of green is excited by it." " What idea is that which we 
call by the name of body ? I find color has the chief share in it. ' Tis 
nothing but color, and figure, which is the termination of this figure, 
together with some powers, such as the power of resisting and motion, 
that wholly takes up what we call body, and if that which we principally 
mean by the thing itself cannot be said to be in the thing itself, I think 



1 84 JOHN WITHERSPOON. [Art. xxm. 

nothing can be. If color exists not out of the mind, then nothing be- 
longing to body exists out of the mind, but resistance, which is solidity, 
and the termination of this resistance with its relations, which is figure, and 
the communication of this resistance from place to place, which is motion ; 
though the latter are nothing but modes of the former. Therefore, there 
is nothing out of the mind but resistance ; and not that either, when nothing 
is actively resisted. Then there is nothing but the power of resistance. 
And, as resistance is nothing but the actual exertion of God's power, so the 
power can be nothing else but the constant law or method of that actual 
exercise." (Notes on Mind, in Dwight's "Life of Edwards.") 

It could be shown that, at this time, there was everywhere a tendency 
towards idealism among the higher minds, which had been trained under the 
philosophy of Locke. The Rev. Samuel Johnson, the tutor of Edwards in 
Yale, who afterwards wrote " Elementa Philosophica," welcomed Berkeley 
on his coming to Rhode Island, and adopted his philosophy. Berkeley was 
personally beloved by all who came in contact with him, and gained some 
devoted adherents' to his theory. In Princeton College, Mr. Meriam, a 
tutor, defended the system. But idealism has never struck deep into the 
American soil. The " Scottish Philosophy," coming in with the great 
Scotch and Scotch-Irish migration, which, next to the Puritan, has had the 
greatest power for good on the American character, has had much greater 
influence. Edwards was acquainted with the moral theory of Hutcheson, 
which makes virtue consist in benevolence ; but propounded one of his 
own, somewhat akin to it, but much more profound, making virtue consist 
in love to being as being. I feel that I must take a passing notice of 
the energetic man who actually introduced Scottish thought into the new 
world. 

John Witherspoon * was the son of a minister of the Church of Scotland, 
and was born February 5, 1722, in the parish of Yester, in East Lothian, 
the probable birthplace of Knox. He entered the university of Edinburgh, 
at the age of fourteen, and pursued his studies there for seven years, with 
such fellow-students as Blair, Robertson, and John Erskine. Carlyle, who 
could not have been specially inclined towards him, is obliged to say that 
" he was open, frank, and generous, pretending to what he was, and sup- 
porting his title with spirit." " At the time I speak of, he was a good 
scholar, far advanced for his age, very sensible and shrewd, but of a disa- 
greeable temper, which was irritated by a flat voice and awkward manner, 
which prevented his making an impression on his contemporaries at all 
adequate to his abilities." Descended from Knox, through his heroic 
daughter, Mrs. Welch, who told King James that she would rather " kep 
his head in her lap" than have him submit to the king's supremacy in 

1 MS. "Life of Witherspoon," by Ashbel Green (formerly President of Prince- 
ton College), in the Library of the New Jersey Historical Society MS. "Life 
of Witherspoon." in a History of the College, by Ex-President Maclean, who has 
kindly allowed me to use it. " Funeral Sermon," by Rev. Dr. Rodgers, of New 
York, in edition of Witherspoon's " Works," Philadelphia, 1800. 



Art. xxm.] HIS "CHARACTERISTICS." 185 

religion," young Witherspoon inherited the spirit of the reformer, 1 — his 
devoted piety, his keen perception of abounding evil, his undaunted cour- 
age, his unflinching perseverance, and, I may add, his vigorous sense and 
his broad humor. He was settled as minister, first in Beith in Ayrshire, 
famous for its cheese, and then in Paisley, famous for its shawls and for 
the piety of its older inhabitants ; and in both places was an effective, 
popular preacher, and wrote works — such as his Treatises on Justification, 
and on Regeneration — which continue to be read with profit to this day. 

He perceived clearly and felt keenly the great change which was coming 
over the Church of Scotland : he watched carefully the rise and progress 
of moderatism, tracing it to the restoration of church patronage, and to 
the philosophy of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, favored by a young race of 
divines, who seemed to him to be addicted to levity in their whole charac- 
ter, to be ready to abandon the old truths, and to trample on the spiritual 
rights of the people. He did not scruple to satirize it in a work, pub- 
lished anonymously, and distinguished for its plain speaking and its humor, 
scarcely inferior in power to the sarcasm of Swift, and having a much 
higher aim, — "Ecclesiastical Characteristics, or the Arcana of Church 
Policy : Being an humble attempt to open the mystery of moderation, 
wherein is shown a plain and easy way of attaining to the character of a 
moderate man, as at present in repute in the Church of Scotland," " Oh, 
yes ! fierce for moderation." " When any man is charged with loose prac- 
tices or tendencies to immoralities, he is to be screened and protected as 
much as possible ; especially if the faults laid to 'his charge be — as they are 
incomparably termed in a sermon, preached by a hopeful youth, that made 
some noise lately — 'good-humored vices.' " " It will serve further for the 
support of this maxim, that, according to modern discoveries, there is a 
great analogy between the moral virtues, or, if you will, the science of 
morals, and the fine arts : and it is on account of this analogy that most 
of the present reigning expressions upon the subject of morals are bor- 
rowed from the arts ; as, beauty, order, proportion, harmony.'- " Another 
thing strongly pleads for gentlemen having the chief hand in settling kirks, 
that nowadays very few of our principal gentry attend ordinances, or 
receive any benefit by a minister after he is settled, unless perhaps talking 
of the news at a private visit or playing a game at backgammon." " As for 
logic, it is well known this part of education is fallen into great contempt, 
and it is not to be expected that such brisk and lively spirits, who have 
always hated every thing that looked scholastic-like, can bear to be tied 
down to the strict rules of argumentation." " It illustrates the truth of 
Mr. H »'s doctrine: that virtue is founded upon instinct and affec- 
tion, and not upon reason ; that benevolence is its source, support, and 
perfection ; and that all the particular rules of conduct are to be suspended 
when they seem to interfere with the general good." This satire cut deep, 
and he was attacked on all hands, for resorting to such a weapon. He 

1 The genealogy seems to have been: — John Knox; Mrs. Welch; her 
daughter married to Mr. Witherspoon ; Rev. James Witherspoon, their son : 
Rev. John Witherspsoon. 



1 86 JOHN WITHERSPOON. [Art. xxm. 

defended himself in a "Serious Apology for the i Ecclesiastical Character- 
istics,' by the real author of that performance." " One other reason I shall 
mention for making choice of this way of writing was drawn from the mod- 
ern notions of philosophy, which had so greatly contributed to the cor- 
ruption of the clergy. The great patron and advocate for these was Lord 
Shaftesbury, one of whose leading principles it is, that ' ridicule is the 
test of truth.' This principle of his had been adopted by many of the 
clergy ; and there is hardly any man conversant in the literary world, who 
has not heard it a thousand times defended in conversation. I was there- 
fore willing to try how they themselves could stand the edge of this weapon." 
Taking his part in the controversy raised by the publication of Home's 
" Douglas/ 1 he published " A Serious Inquiry into the Nature and Effects 
of the Stage." Robertson, now acknowledged as the consummately able 
leader of the moderate party, found at times a powerful opponent in With- 
erspoon. Dr. Robertson had remarked that, with a real minority, the mod- 
erate party had been able to carry their measures ; whereupon Witherspoon 
said : ' We allow you whatever merit you may be entitled to for your skill, 
but remember the authority which says, ' the children of this world are 
wiser in their generation than the children of light.' " One day after 
Witherspoon had carried some important questions in the General Assembly, 
Dr. Robertson said to him in a pleasant and easy manner : " I think you 
have your men better disciplined than formerly," a remark showing how 
much value he set on skilful leadership. " Yes," replied Witherspoon, 
" by urging your politics too far, you have compelled us to beat you with 
your own weapons." He acts in character throughout, and as if he still 
lived in the seventeenth century. On the night before the communion sab- 
bath, it is reported that a set of youths, following the example set in the 
" hell-fire clubs," to which I have referred (p. 19), held a meeting for mock 
preaching and praying. This was an awful scene to be enacted, in so godly 
a town as Paisley, where, on a sabbath morning, family praise might 
be heard rising from every dwelling ; and Witherspoon a fortnight after, 
Feb. 21, 1762, preaches "a seasonable advice to young persons," and 
publishes it with the names of the offenders. But he is living in the eight- 
eenth and not the seventeenth century, and a lawyer started an action and 
got costs, which greatly embarrassed the doctor. All these things — the 
enemies raised up by the " Characteristics," and these local troubles — must 
have made Scotland somewhat too hot for him, the more so that the law was 
against him, and the church party opposed to him was increasing in power 
and in imperiousness. He had a brave heart and could have stood it 
all. But it was at this juncture that there came an invitation to him to 
become president of the college of New Jersey, Princeton. He did not 
listen to that call when it was first made in 1766; but he accepted it in 
1768, and was inducted as president, Sept. 28 of that year. He had 
now a far wider field opened to him than ever he could have had in 
his own country, where all the civil patronage and the literature of the age 
were against him. He has evidently fallen into his predestined sphere, 
and feels that he has a fitness, a taste, and a talent for the work. 
The course of instruction followed in the college during his administra- 



Art. xxhi.] COLLEGE OF NEW JERSEY. 187 

tion was a good one. " In the first year, they read Latin and Greek, with 
the Roman and Grecian antiquities and rhetoric. In the second, contin- 
uing the study of languages, they learn a complete system of geography 
with the use of the globes, the first principles of philosophy, and the ele- 
ments of mathematical knowledge. The third, though the languages are 
not wholly omitted, is chiefly employed in mathematics and natural philos- 
ophy, and the senior year is employed in reading the higher classics, pro- 
ceeding in the mathematics and natural philosophy, and going through a 
course of moral philosophy." In addition, Dr. Witherspoon delivered lect- 
ures to the juniors and seniors upon chronology and history, and upon 
composition and criticism, and taught Hebrew and French to those who 
wished it. During the whole course of their studies, the three younger 
classes, two or three every evening, were called to pronounce an oration on 
a stage erected for the purpose, immediately after prayers, " that they may 
learn, by early habit, presence of mind and proper pronunciation and gest- 
ure in public speaking." " The senior scholars, every five or six weeks, 
pronounce orations of their own composition, to which all persons of any 
note in the neighborhood are invited or admitted." (" Address by Wither- 
spoon in behalf of the College of New Jersey.") It will be observed that in 
this last provision, that for public speaking, there is something not found 
in the European colleges. The course as a whole is good ; but the State 
of New Jersey would not furnish funds, and private benevolence did not 
supply sufficient means to procure an adequate number of instructors. By 
means of this instruction, even with its scanty staff of teachers, the college 
in that age raised, not only a large body of devoted ministers, but a great 
number of the ablest statesmen and lawyers of which America can boast, 
and furnished professors to a great many colleges, west and south. l With- 
erspoon took four different departments, composition, taste, and criticism ; 
chronology and history ; moral philosophy ; and divinity. Many of his 
pupils have testified to the benefit which they derived from his instructions, 
so sagacious, so stimulating and practically useful. In particular, James 
Madison, perhaps the most philosophical of all the founders and framers 
of the American constitution, acknowledges his obligations to the study of 
moral philosophy under Witherspoon. "The increased attention paid to the 
study of the nature and constitution of the human mind, and the improve- 
ments which had been introduced into this fundamental department of 
knowledge by the philosophical inquiries of his own countrymen, consti- 
tuted a marked and most important feature of Dr. Witherspoon's reforms. 
Mr. Madison formed a taste for these inquiries, which entered deeply, as we 
shall hereafter have occasion to remark, into the character and habits of 
his mind, and gave to his political writings in after life a profound and 
philosophic cast, which distinguished them eminently and favorably from 
the production of the ablest of his contemporaries." (" Life and Times 
of Madison," by William C. Rives.) 

President Ashbel Green tells us, " The Berkeleyan system of metaphysics 
was in repute in the college when he entered. The tutors were zealous 

1 " Princeton College during the Eighteenth Century," by Samuel D. Alex- 
ander. 



188 JOHN WITHERSPOON. [Art. xxm. 

believers in it, and waited on the president with some expectation of either 
confounding him, or making him a proselyte. They had mistaken their 
man. He first reasoned against the system, and then ridiculed it till he 
drove it out of the college. The writer has heard him state, that, before 
Reid or any other author of their views had published any theory on the 
ideal system, he wrote against it, and suggested the same trains of thought 
which they adopted, and that he published his essay in a Scotch magazine." 
He refers in his moral philosophy to the common-sense school of 
Scotland. "Some late writers have advanced, with great apparent reason, 
that there are certain first principles or dictates of common-sense, which 
are either simple perceptions or seen with intuitive evidence. These are 
the foundation of all reasoning, and, without them, to reason is a word with- 
out a meaning. They can no more be proved than you can prove an axiom 
in mathematical science. These authors of Scotland have lately produced 
and supported this opinion, to resolve at once all the refinement and meta- 
physical objections of some infidel writers. ("Moral Philosophy," sect, 
v.) His son-in-law, and his successor as president, Samuel Stanhope 
Smith, at one time inclined to Berkeleyanism, formally renounces idealism. 
" Whatever medium, in the opinion of these philosophers (Locke, Berke- 
ley, and Hume), nature may employ to connect the object with the organ 
of sense, whether image or idea, or any other sensible phantasm, it is, be- 
yond a doubt, the object itself, not its idea, which is discovered by the 
sense ; any image or phantasm, in the case, being either unknown or unper- 
ceived, and at the time wholly unthought of. An idea is merely a concep- 
tion of the fancy, or the reminiscence of the object." l From this date, the 
Scottish became the most influential philosophy in America. 

His work on moral philosophy is not particularly profound or interesting. 
But I suppose we have only the skeleton of his course ; and, as he illustrated 
it orally by his reading and wide observation of mankind, I believe it was 
useful and attractive. He discussed such authors as Leibnitz, Clarke, 
Hutcheson, Wollaston, Collins, Nettleton, Hume, Kames, Adam Smith, 
Reid, Balfour, Butler, Balguy, Beattie. He had vigorously opposed Hutch- 
eson in Scotland, and he sees the logical result of his view of virtue in the 
systems of Hume and Home, who are criticised by him. He refers to 
the theory of his predecessor in office, Edwards, that " virtue consists in the 
love of being as such," but without approval. His own view is summed 
up in these words : " There is in the nature of things a difference between 
virtue and vice ; and, however much virtue and happiness are connected by 
the divine law and in the event of things, we are made so as to feel towards 
them and conceive of them as distinct, — we have the simple perceptions 
of duty and interest." " The result of the whole is, that we ought to take 
the rule of duty from conscience, enlightened by reason, experience, and 
every way by which we can be supposed to learn the will of our Maker." 

1 Stanhope Smith's " Lectures on Moral and Political Philosophy." Stanhope 
Smith was the author of an " Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion 
and Figure of the Human Species." He holds by the unity of the race, and ac- 
counts for the diversities by natural causes. It was first published, 1787, and ran 
through several editions. 



Art. xxiii.] HIS POLITICAL INFLUENCE. 189 

But Witherspoon was a man of action, rather than reflection. His admin- 
istration of the college seems to have been successful. Following the orig- 
inal theory of the American college, Princeton college was placed in a 
village supposed to be away from the temptations of great cities. " It 
is not," Witherspoon says, " in the power of those who are in great 
cities to keep the discipline with equal strictness where boys have so 
many temptations to do evil, and can so easily and effectually conceal it 
after it is done. With us, they live all in college, under the inspection 
of their masters ; and the village is so small that any irregularity is imme- 
diately and certainly discovered, and therefore easily corrected." The 
rules of government which he explained to the tutors are admirable. " Gov- 
ern, govern always, but beware of governing too much. Convince your 
pupils, for you may convince them, that you would rather gratify than 
thwart them ; that you wish to see them happy; and desire to impose no 
restraints but such as their real advantage, and the order and welfare of 
the college, render indispensable. Put a wide difference between youthful 
follies and foibles, and those acts which manifest a malignant spirit or 
intentional insubordination. Do not even notice the former, except it be 
by private advice. Overlook them entirely, unless they occur in such a 
public manner that it is known that you must have observed them. Be 
exceeding careful not to commit your own authority or that of the college, 
in any case that cannot be carried through with equity. But having pur- 
sued this system, then, in every instance in which there has been a mani- 
fest intention to offend or resist your authority, or that of the college, make 
no compromise with it whatever : put it down absolutely and entirely. 
Maintain the authority of the laws ; n their full extent, and fear no conse- 
quences." 

But his influence was exerted and felt far beyond the college walls. As 
might have been expected from his love of liberty, and his impetuous spirit, 
and the part he took in Scotland, he early threw himself into the struggle 
for independence, and he was elected a representative in Congress for the 
State of New Jersey, in 1776, and declared there the way by which he had 
been led. " We were contending for a restoration of certain privileges 
under the government of Great Britain, and were praying for a reunion 
with her. But in the beginning of July, with the universal approbation of 
all the States now united, we renounced this conviction, and declared our- 
selves free and independent." His is one of the names — the most hon- 
ored of any in America — attached to the Declaration of Independence, 
and his portrait adorns Independence Hall. I rather think that — if we 
except Washington, Franklin, and perhaps half a dozen others — none had 
so important an influence as Witherspoon in guiding the American Revo- 
lution. It will be remembered that one of the decisive battles of the war 
was fought at Princeton ; and, in 1783, the Congress sat for months in the 
college, presided over by one of the trustees, and with Witherspoon as a 
member. When in Congress, he exerted himself to secure a firm, central 
government, and a gold instead of a paper standard. He retired from 
Congress in 1783, to give himself to his college work. He died, Nov. 
15. 1794. 



190 JAMES BALFOUR. [Art. xxiv. 

From the picture of him by the elder Peale in Princeton college, and the 
account given by Ashbel Green, we learn that " his stature was of middle 
size, with some tendency to corpulence. His limbs were well-proportioned, 
and his complexion was fair. His eyes were strongly indicative of intelli- 
gence. His eyebrows were large, hanging down at the ends next his 
temples, occasioned, probably, by a habit he had contracted of pulling them 
when he was under excitement." His whole air is that of a man of strong 
character ; and we see traces of his being naturally a man of strong pas- 
sion, which, however, he was able to subdue. Scotland did not allow him, 
what would have been for her good, to become a leader of men ; and Scot- 
land's loss became America's gain. 



XXIV. — yAMES BALFOUR. 

He was a member of the Scotch bar, and one of the many Edinburgh law- 
yers who devoted themselves to philosophy. He was one of the first to 
write against the ethical principles of Hume, which he did in his " Delinea- 
tions of the Nature and Obligations of Morality," published anonymously, 
1752 or 1753. He sets out with the principle that private happiness must 
be the chief end and object of every man's pursuit ; shows how the good of 
others affords the highest happiness ; and then to sanction natural con- 
science he calls in the authority of God, who must approve of what promotes 
the greatest happiness. This theory does not give morality a sufficiently 
deep foundation in the constitution of man or the character of God, and 
could not have stood against the assaults of Hume. In 1754, he was ap- 
pointed professor of moral philosophy in the university of Edinburgh, — 
the chair which David Hume had wished to fill some years before, — and con- 
tinued to hold it till 1764, when he became professor of the law of nature 
and nations, and held the office till about 1779. ^ n J 768, he published a 
second work, written against Hume and Lord Karnes and in defence of 
active power and liberty. Like all enlightened opponents of the new scep- 
ticism, he felt it necessary to oppose the favorite theory of Locke, that all 
our ideas are derived from sensation and reflection. "It may indeed be 
allowed that the first notions of things are given to the mind by means of 
some sensation or other ; but then it may also be true that after such notions 
are given the mind, by the exertion of some inherent power, may be able to 
discover some remarkable qualities of such things, and even things of a 
very different nature, which are not to be discovered merely by any sense 
whatever." He published " Philosophical Dissertations," in 1782. 

He was born in 1705, and died 1795. His father was a merchant in 
Edinburgh, and his mother a daughter of Hamilton of Airdrie, from which 
family Sir William Hamilton was descended. He seems to have received 
his education first in Edinburgh College, and then, like so many scholars of 
the preceding ages, at Leyden. 






Art. xxv.] ALEXANDER GERARD. 191 



XXV.— ALEXANDER GERARD. 

He was the son of the minister of a parish, called the chapel of Garioch, in 
Aberdeenshire, and was born in 1728. In July, 1752, he was admitted pro- 
fessor of moral philosophy in Marischal College. In August, 1755, he sub- 
mits in a printed paper an improved plan of education for the college. He 
argues powerfully against the established practice of teaching logic in the 
early years of the course. He recommends that the curriculum consist : 
First year, classics ; second year, history and elementary mathematics ; 
third year, natural philosophy, with belles-lettres and mathematics ; fourth 
year, pneumatology, or natural philosophy of spirit, including the doctrine 
of the nature, faculties, and states of the human mind, and natural theology ; 
moral philosophy, containing ethics, jurisprudence, and politics, — the study 
of these being accompanied with a perusal of some of the best ancient mor- 
alists ; logic, or the laws and rules of inventing, proving, retaining, and 
communicating knowledge ; and metaphysics. This is, in many respects, 
an enlightened course, but confines the attention of every student too exclu- 
sively to one department for the year, — whereas the mind works better with 
some variety, — and does not give a sufficient space to classics and English. 
This course was substantially adopted by the college, which thus came to 
differ from the other Scotch universities. 

It is indicative of a strong desire on the part of an enlightened body of 
men to promote elegance and refinement in their country, that the Edin- 
burgh Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Sciences, Manufactures, and 
Agriculture offered a premium for the best essay on " Taste," the phrase 
" taste " having come unfortunately into use as the translation of the French 
"gout." The prize was gained by Gerard, and the work was published in 
1759, the publisher adding three dissertations by Voltaire, D'Alembert, and 
Montesquieu. Anxious to promote the objects of the above-named society, he 
offered through it a gold medal on style in composition. In the same year, 
he was chosen professor of divinity in Marischal, and, in 1773, he became 
professor of divinity in King's College, and his attention was thus called 
away from philosophy. In 1766, he published "Dissertations on Subjects 
relating to the Genius and Evidences of Christianity." Still cherishing his 
old tastes, he published, in 1774, an "Essay on Genius," meant to be the 
complement of his work on " Taste." He wrote also " Sermons," in two 
volumes : " The Pastoral Care ; " and " The Evidences of the Christian 
Religion." 

He is best known by his work on " Taste." He enlarges the number of 
senses or tastes far beyond what Hutcheson or any other has done, — illus- 
trating the sense or taste of novelty, sublimity, beauty, imitation, harmony, 
oddity and ridicule, and virtue, and shows how they all enter into fine taste. 
He calls them internal or reflex senses, as distinguished from external 
senses. He does not enter upon a searching inquiry into their psychologi- 
cal nature, nor seek to determine what objective reality is implied in them : 
he contents himself with a graceful, pleasant exposition and illustration. 



192 THOMAS RE ID. [Art. xxvi. 

In his other philosophical work, he describes genius as the faculty of inven- 
tion, treats of such interesting subjects as the influence of habit and passion 
on association, and quotes largely from the best writers of Greece and 
Rome, France and England ; but shows little analytic or metaphysical 
acumen. By his lectures and works, he helped to create and foster a liter- 
ary taste in the region of which Aberdeen claims to be the capital, and is 
believed to have had influence on the studies and teaching of Beattie. 
Beattie is said to allude to him, when he speaks of a person who "by two 
hours' application could fix a sermon in his mind so effectively as to be able 
to recite it in public without the change, omission, or transposition of a 
single word." He died in 1795. 1 



XXVI. — THOMAS REID} 

If he was not the founder, he is the fit representative of the 
Scottish philosophy. He is in every respect, a Scotchman of 
the genuine type : shrewd, cautious, outwardly calm, and yet 
with a deep well of feeling within, and capable of enthusiasm ; 
not witty, but with a quiet vein of humor. And then he has 
the truly philosophic spirit : seeking truth modestly, humbly, 
diligently ; piercing beneath the surface to gaze on the true 
nature of things ; and not to be caught by sophistry, or misled 
by plausible representations. He has not the mathematical 
consecutiveness of Descartes, the speculative genius of Leib- 
nitz, the sagacity of Locke, the spirituel of Berkeley, or the 

1 I may mention, as belonging to the same age, "An Essay on Virtue and 
Harmony, wherein a Reconciliation of the Various Accounts of Moral Obligation 
is attempted," by William Jameson, M.A. minister of Rerick, 1749. He shows 
that man is endowed with various senses, but especially with a moral sense ; and, 
"as several parts or strains of music and different musical instruments do com- 
pose a concert, so the various sorts of beauty, order, proportion, and harmony in 
the vegetable kingdom, in the animal, and in the intellectual system, constitute 
one universal harmony or concert : in that grand concert, every man is bound to 
perform his part in a proper key, as it were, or in just consonance with the whole 
which can only be done by the order and harmony of his affections, and the 
beauty and regularity of his actions." The scepticism of Hume cast aside these 
inquiries into senses and tastes, and led to the profounder philosophy of Reid. 

2 "Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Reid," by Dugald Stewart; 
"The Works of Thomas Reid," by Sir William Hamilton; MS. letters in pos- 
session of the late Alexander Thomson of Banchory (used by Hamilton) ; Papers 
of Dr. Reid in possession of Francis Edmond of Aberdeen. 



Art. xxvi.] HIS CHARACTERISTICS. 193 

detective skill of Hume ; but he has a quality quite as valuable 
as any of these, even in philosophy ; he has in perfection that 
common-sense which he so commends, and this saves him 
from the extreme positions into which these great men have 
been tempted by the soaring nature of their inexorable logic. 
" It is genius, and not the want of it, that adulterates philos- 
ophy." He looks steadily and inquires carefully into the sub- 
jects of which he is treating ; and if he does not go round them 
he acknowledges that he has not done so ; and what he does see, 
he sees clearly and describes honestly. " The labyrinth may 
be too intricate, and the thread too fine to be traced through 
all its windings ; but if we stop when we can trace it no farther, 
and secure the ground we have gained, there is no harm done, 
and a quicker eye may at times trace it farther." Speculative 
youths are apt to feel that, because he is so sober, and makes 
so little pretension, he cannot possibly be far-seeing or pro- 
found ; but this is at the time of life when they have risen 
above taking a mother's counsel, and become wiser than their 
fathers ; and, after following other and more showy lights 
for a time, they may at last be obliged to acknowledge that 
they have here the true light of the sun, which it is safer to 
follow than that of the flashing meteor. M. Cousin, in his 
preface to the last edition of his volume on the Scottish phi- 
losophy, declares that the true modern Socrates has not been 
Locke, but Reid. " Kant," he says, " has commenced the Ger- 
man philosophy, but he has not governed it. It early escaped 
him, to throw itself in very opposite directions. The name of 
Kant rests only on the ruins of his doctrines. Reid has im- 
pressed on the Scottish mind a movement less grand, but this 
movement has had no reactions." " Yes," he adds, " Reid is 
a man of genius, and of a true and powerful originality ; so we 
said in 1819, and so we say in 1857, after having held long con- 
verse with mighty systems, discovered their secret, and taken 
their measure." There is profound truth in this ; but it is 
scarcely correct to say that there have been no reactions 
against Reid in Scotland. There was a reaction by Brown 
against his indiscriminate admission of first principles. Again, 
there is a reaction in the present day on the part of those who 
dislike his appeal to consciousness as revealing to us a certain 
amount of truth, and who deal, in consequence, solely with 

13 



194 THOMAS RE ID. [Art. xxvi. 

historical sketches of philosophic systems, or who make the 
philosophy of the human mind a branch of physiology. Still 
Reid has continued to exercise a greater influence than any 
other metaphysician on the thought of his country. It is true, 
that in some respects he resembles Socrates ; but in others he 
differs from him quite as much as the Scotch mind differs from 
the Greek. Both have very much the same truth-loving spirit, 
the same homely sense, and contempt for pretension : but 
Socrates has vastly more subtlety and dialectic skill, and 
reaches the conclusion that truth cannot be found except in 
moral subjects ; whereas Reid firmly maintains and resolutely 
proclaims that settled truth can be attained by observation, 
in the kingdoms both of mind and matter. Reid's style 
will not please those who are seeking for flashes of genius, 
of wit or eloquence. But it always clearly expresses his ideas ; 
and some prefer his plain statements, his familiar idioms, com- 
monly purely English, to the stateliness of Stewart, — who 
cannot express a commonplace thought except in a rounded 
period, — and the perpetual rhetoric of Brown. 

Thomas Reid was born, April 26, 1710, at Strachan, which 
is situated about twenty miles from Aberdeen, on the banks of 
a lively mountain stream, which rises on the high Grampians, 
and flows down the hollows of their northern slope into the 
Dee. The place is rather tame, and must have been bleak 
enough in winter ; but it is quite a spot in which a thoughtful 
student might profitably pass the long summer vacations which 
the Scotch colleges allow, and have enjoyable rambles among 
the heath-clad and rocky mountains above him, including 
Clochnaben with the conspicuous stone on the top. His 
father, the Rev. Lewis Reid, was minister of the place for fifty 
years, and stood by the whig and reformation cause at the 
great crisis of the Revolution of 1688, when the people of that 
region, still under strong landlord influence, might have been 
readily swayed to the one side or the other. He was descended 
from a succession of presbyterian ministers in Banchory-Ter- 
nan on the Dee, who traced their descent from an old county 
family, and go as far back as the Reformation. His mother 
was Margaret Gregory of Kinnairdie in Banffshire, and be- 
longed to the family of that name, which was so illustrious in 
Scotland during the whole of last century and the beginning 



Art. xxvi.] HIS BOYHOOD. 195 

of this. On both sides of his house were persons who had 
risen to eminence in literature and science. On his father's 
side, Dugald Stewart mentions Thomas Reid, who, on finishing 
his education at home, went to the continent, and maintained 
public discussions in several universities, and afterwards col- 
lected his theses in a volume ; who published some Latin poems 
to be found in the " Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum ; " who 
became Secretary in the Greek and Latin tongues to James I., 
and, along with Patrick Young, translated the works of that 
monarch into Latin. A brother of his, Alexander Reid, was 
physician to King Charles I., and published several books on 
medicine ; and another brother, Adam, translated into English 
Buchanan's " History of Scotland." On the side of the Gregorys 
the subject of our memoir could claim as grand-uncle, James 
Gregory, the inventor of the reflecting telescope, and as uncles 
David Gregory, — Savilian professor of astronomy at Oxford, 
and an intimate friend of Sir Isaac Newton's, — and two others, 
professors of mathematics respectively at St. Andrews and 
Edinburgh. Such a kinsmanship must have given a powerful 
stimulus towards literature and science to a thoughtful youth 
like Thomas Reid. 

The boy was two years at the parish school of Kincardine 
when the teacher foretold " that he would turn out to be a man 
of good and well-wearing parts." He was then sent to Aber- 
deen to prosecute his classical studies. He entered Marischal 
College, Aberdeen, in 1722, when he was only twelve years of 
ae^e. He was in the first Greek class taught by Dr. Thomas 
Blackwell, afterwards principal, who took such pains to revive 
the study of the Greek tongue in the north of Scotland ; and 
the pupil seems to have caught somewhat of the spirit of his 
master, for in after life he was known to recite in his class 
demonstrations of Euclid in the Greek language. But his 
special instructor was Dr. George Turnbull, who conducted 
him and other thirty-nine pupils through a three years' course 
in what was called philosophy. 

He has left us in a letter written in 17/9, an account of a 
curious youthful experience. 

" About the age of fourteen, I was almost every night, unhappy in my 
sleep, from frightful dreams : sometimes hanging over a dreadful hemi- 
sphere and just ready to drop down ; sometimes pursued for my life and 



196 THOMAS REID. [Art. xxvi. 

stopped by a wall, or by a sudden loss of all strength ; sometimes ready to 
be devoured by a wild beast. How long I was plagued with such dreams, 
I do not now recollect. I believe it was for a year or two at least ; and 
I think they had quite left me before I was fifteen. In those days, I was 
much given to what Mr. Addison, in one of his " Spectators,' 1 calls castle- 
building ; and, in my evening solitary walk, which was generally all the 
exercise I took, my thoughts would hurry me into some active scene, where 
I generally acquitted myself much to my own satisfaction ; and, in these 
scenes of imagination, I performed many a gallant exploit. At the same 
time, in my dreams, I found myself the most arrant coward that ever was. 
Not onlymy courage, but my strength, failed me in every danger ; and I 
often rose from my bed in the morning in such a panic that it took some 
time to get the better of it. I wished very much to be free of these uneasy 
dreams, which not only made me unhappy in sleep, but often left a disa- 
greeable impression in my mind, for some part of the following day. I 
thought it was worth trying whether it was possible to recollect that it was 
all a dream, and that I was in no real danger. I often went to sleep with 
my mind as strongly impressed as I could with this thought, that I never 
in my lifetime was in any real danger, and that every fright I had was a 
dream. After many fruitless endeavors to recollect this when the danger ap- 
peared, I effected it at last, and have often, when I was sliding over a preci- 
pice into the abyss, recollected that it was all a dream, and boldly jumped 
down. The effect of this commonly was, that I immediately awoke. But 
I awoke calm and intrepid, which I thought a great acquisition. After this, 
my dreams were never very uneasy ; and, in a short time, I dreamed not at 
all. During all this time I was in perfect health ; but whether my ceasing 
to dream was the effect of the recollection above mentioned, or of any 
change in the habit of my body, which is usual about that period of life, I 
cannot tell. I think it may more probably be imputed to the last. How- 
ever, the fact was that, for at least forty years after, I dreamed none, to the 
best of my remembrance ; and, finding from the testimony of others that 
this is somewhat uncommon, I have often, as soon as I awoke, endeavored 
to recollect without being able to recollect any thing that passed in my sleep. 
For some years past, I can sometimes recollect some kind of dreaming 
thoughts, but so incoherent that I can make nothing of them. The only 
distinct dream I ever had since I was about sixteen, as far as I remember, 
was about two years ago. I had got my head blistered for a fall. A plaster, 
which was put on it after the blister, pained me excessively for a whole 
night. In the morning I slept a little, and dreamed very distinctly that I 
had fallen into the hands of a party of Indians, and was scalped. I am 
apt to think that, as there is a state of sleep and a state wherein we are 
awake, so there is an intermediate state which partakes of the other two. 
If a man peremptorily resolves to rise at an early hour for some interesting 
purpose, he will of himself awake at that hour. A sick-nurse gets the 
habit of sleeping in such a manner that she hears the least whisper of the 
sick person, and yet is refreshed by this kind of half sleep. The same is 
the case of a nurse who sleeps with a child in her arms. I have slept on 
horseback, but so as to preserve my balance ; and, if the horse stumbled, I 



Art. xxvi.] MINISTER OF NEW MACHAR. 197 

could make the exertion necessary for saving me from a fall, as if I was 
awake. I hope the sciences at your good university are not in this state. 
Yet, from so many learned men so much at their ease, one would expect 
something more than we hear of." 

He graduated in 1726 at the age of sixteen. His college 
life was prolonged by his being appointed librarian to the uni- 
versity, which office he continued to hold till 1736. Ever a 
student, and busied with solid work, he joined eagerly with his 
•friend John Stewart, afterwards professor in Marischal College, 
in pursuing mathematical studies, specially the " Principia " of 
Newton. His life was varied by his taking with his friend 
Stewart an excursion into England, and visiting London, 
Oxford, and Cambridge. Through his relative David Gregory 
he got access to the house of Martin Folkes, where he met with 
"the most interesting objects which the metropolis had to 
offer to his curiosity. At Cambridge he saw Dr. Bentley, — who 
delighted him with his learning and amused him with his 
vanity, — and enjoyed repeatedly the conversation of the blind 
mathematician Saunderson, a phenomenon in the history of the 
human mind to which he has referred more than once in his 
philosophical speculations." 

In 1737, he was presented by King's College, Aberdeen, to 
the living of New Machar, — a country parish about a dozen 
miles from Aberdeen, lying on the level agricultural land of the 
county, but with glorious views of the distant mountains towards 
the west. The circumstances connected with his settlement 
furnish a vivid picture of the age. By this time there was a 
keen antagonism between the Evangelical and the Moderate 
parties in the Church of Scotland and this was fiercely mani- 
fested on this occasion. In order to his being settled, the 
probationer or minister had not only to receive a presentation 
from the patron, but a " call " from the people, which, however, 
was by this time becoming a mere form, as the ecclesiastical 
courts falling under the influence of the patronage spirit con- 
trived to avoid insisting on a bona fide concurrence from the 
members of the congregation. We have preserved " A Ser- 
mon preached before the Reverend the Presbytery of Aberdeen 
in the Church of New Machar, Feb. 10, 1737, at the Moderation 
of a Call to a Minister for that vacant Church, by Mr. John 
Bisset, Minister of the Gospel at Aberdeen." Mr. Bisset had 



193 THOMAS BE ID. [Art. xxvi. 

formerly been minister of New Machar, and was known all 
over the north as a popular preacher, a defender of evangelical 
religion, and an opponent of patronage. In this discourse, 
which is full of stirring appeals, he warns the people against 
" the fear of man which bringeth a snare," against being intimi- 
dated by their landlords, and acting on the slavish principle, 
" I am for the man the laird is for." Expressing his affection 
for a people to whom he had been minister for twelve years, 
he reminds them that when he left them their landlords had 
persuaded them to take a minister who had fallen into fornica- 
tion and absconded. He complains of persons not residing in 
the parish, or though residing in it not attending gospel ordi- 
nances, interfering to serve a friend, referring, it is supposed, to 
a near relative of Dr. Reid's. He asserts that the election of a 
minister is a Christian right, and that " the poor Christian in 
vile raiment may claim the same regard that is paid to him who 
wears the gay clothing, the gold ring, and the goodly apparel." 
" It is a poor and worthless story for any man to say, that you, 
the people, are tenants at will, and to improve this as if you 
were to have no will but theirs in the work of this day. Well 
may you reply that you are tenants at God's will, who can take 
them away with His stroke when they are thinking to have 
their wills of you. He exhorts them to trust in God and do 
what is right, and warns them that, even though they should 
by acting an unconscientious part secure an earthly habitation, 
yet they might soon be driven out of it." The appea produced 
a powerful effect. The people, having no hope of getting their 
rights protected by the church courts, adopted a mode of 
expressing their feelings characteristic of the times. The tra- 
dition is that, when their minister came to the place, men 
dressed in women's clothes, ducked him in a pond ; and that, on 
the sabbath on which he preached his first sermon, an uncle of 
his who resided at Rosehill, two miles off, defended him on the 
pulpit stair with a drawn sword. 

I am not sure that the sphere to which Reid was now ap- 
pointed was the one exactly suited to him, or that he was the 
fittest man to preach the gospel of Christ to a country congre- 
gation, or indeed that the old Scotch theory of connecting the 
church and the colleges so closely was the best either for the 
church or the colleges. For the first seven years he was in 



Art. xxvi.] DEVOTES HIMSELF TO GOD. 1 99 

the way of preaching the sermons of others, a practice very 
obnoxious to the people. The tradition is that on one occasion 

when at Fintray, three miles off, the lady of Sir Forbes 

thanked him for preaching on the previous sabbath so excel- 
lent a sermon from Tillotson ; whereupon he denied in strong 
terms that he had taken a sermon from Tillotson. To his 
confusion he found, on retiring to his bedroom, a volume of 
Tillotson's on his table, lying open at the place where was the 
discourse he had preached. Ashamed, not of the fact of his 
preaching another man's sermons, but of his being supposed 
capable of uttering a falsehood, he hastened to inform the lady 
that he had taken the discourse not from Tillotson's published 
sermons, but from a packet which he had otherwise. 1 

But while thus obnoxious at his first settlement, he is said to 
have gradually won the good opinion of his parishioners by the 
propriety of his conduct, his conscientiousness, and his kind- 
ness. His popularity was increased when, in 1740, he married 
Elizabeth, — the daughter of his uncle Dr. George Reid, physi- 
cian in London, — who endeared herself to the people by her 
kind offices to the sick and poor. There is reason to believe 
that in the later years of his ministry he became earnest in his 
Master's service. The tradition is that, in dispensing the sacra- 
ment of the supper, tears rolled from his eyes, when he spoke 
of the loveliness of the Saviour's character. The following 
dedication of himself to God is preserved in the manuscripts, 2 
and lets us see more clearly than any thing that has been printed 
by Dugald Stewart the deep feeling that lay beneath that calm 
outward demeanor. It is dated March 30, 1746. 

" O God : I desire humbly to supplicate thy Divine Majesty in behalf of 
my distressed wife, who is by thy hand brought very low, and in imminent 
danger of death, if thou, who alone dost wonders, do not in mercy interpose 
thy Almighty arm, and bring her back from the gates of death. I deserve 
justly, O Lord, that thou shouldst deprive me of the greatest comfort of my 
life, because I have not been so thankful to thee as I ought for giving me 
such a kind and affectionate wife. I have forgot thy goodness in bringing 
us happy together by an unforeseen and undesigned train of events, and 
blessing us with so much love and harmony of affections and so many of the 

1 One version is, that Tillotson had preached from Clarke, and that, in conse- 
quence, one of Clarke's sermons had been published among Tillotson's sermons, 
and that Reid had taken the sermon from Clarke, while the lady had read it in 
Tillotson. I have not found any confirmation of this. 

2 In possession of Francis Edmond. 



200 THOMAS RE ID. [Art. xxvi. 

comforts and conveniences of life. I have not been so careful as I ought to 
have been to stir her up to piety and Christian virtues. I have not taken 
that pains with my children and servants and relatives as I ought. Alas ! 
I have been too negligent of my pastoral duty in my private devotions, too 
much given to the pleasures and satisfactions of this world, and too little 
influenced by thy promises and the hopes of a future state. I have employed 
my studies, reading, and conversation, rather to please myself than to edify 
myself and others. I have sinned greatly in neglecting many opportunities 
of making private applications to my flock and family in the affairs of their 
souls, and in using too slight preparation for my public exercises. I have 
thrown away too much of my time in sloth and sleep, and have not done so 
much for the relief of the poor and destitute as I might have done. The 
means that Providence has afforded me of correcting my evil inclinations I 
have abused to pamper and feed them, n various instances. For these and 
many other sins which have escaped my memory, thou mightst justly inflict 
so great a chastisement upon me, as to make my children motherless, and 
deprive me of my dear wife. O Lord, for thy mercy's sake, accept of my 
humble and penitent confession of these my offences, which I desire to ac- 
knowledge with shame and sorrow, and am resolved by thy grace to amend. 
If thou art pleased to hearken to the voice of my supplications, and grant 
my request in behalf of my dear wife in restoring her to health, I do prom- 
ise and covenant through grace to turn from these backslidings, to express 
my thankfulness by a vigorous discharge of my duty as a Christian, a min- 
ister, and master of a family ; and by an alms of ten pounds sterling to the 
poor, in meal and money. Lord, pardon, if there is any thing in this over 
presumptuous, or unbecoming a humble, penitent sinner ; and, Lord, accept 
of what is sincerely designed as a new bond upon my soul to my duty, 
through Jesus Christ, my Lord and Saviour." 

Stewart tells us that, " during his residence at New Machar, 
the greater part of his time was spent in the most intense study ; 
more particularly in a careful examination of the laws of ex- 
ternal perception, and of the other principles which form the 
groundwork of human knowledge. His chief relaxations were 
gardening and botany, to both of which pursuits he retained his 
attachment in old age." It was while he was minister, and at 
the mature age of thirty-eight, that he published in the " Trans- 
actions of the Royal Society of London," " An Essay on 
Quantity, occasioned by reading a Treatise in which Simple 
and Compound Ratios are applied to Virtue and Merit." Fran- 
cis Hutcheson had spoken of the benevolence of an agent — 
which with him constitutes virtue — as " proportional to a frac- 
tion, having the moment of good for the numerator and the ability 
of the agent for denominator." I suspect that he meant this 
to be little more than an illustration, and did not seriously pro- 



Art. xxvi.] PROFESSOR IN ABERDEEN. 201 

pose to apply mathematical demonstration to moral subjects. 
But Pitcairn and Cheyne had been applying mathematical 
reasoning to medicine ; and Reid thought it of importance to 
show what it is that renders a subject susceptible of mathe- 
matical demonstration. It is interesting to notice that the first 
publications both of Reid and Kant had a relation to mathe- 
matical subjects. But it was the publication of Hume's " Trea- 
tise of Human Nature " that first directed his intellectual 
abilities to independent philosophic research. In his " Essays 
on the Intellectual Powers," published in 1785, he says, <4 hav- 
ing long believed the prevailing doctrine of ideas, it came into 
my mind more than forty years ago to put the question, 
What evidence have I for this doctrine, that all the objects 
of my knowledge are ideas of my own mind ? From that 
time to the present, I have been candidly and impartially, as 
I think, seeking for the evidence of this principle ; but can 
find none, excepting the authority of philosophers." It is clear 
that the professors of King's College put one so employed in 
the fitting place, when, in 1752, they elected him professor of 
philosophy. 

" Immediately on Dr. Reid's appointment to the place of one 
of the regents of King's College, he prevailed on his col- 
leagues to make great improvements in their system of uni- 
versity education. The session was extended from five to 
seven months ; a humanity class was added, on a higher scale 
than had been taught previously ; and the teaching of the ele- 
ments of Latin, by the professor of humanity, discontinued ; 
some of the small bursaries were united, and an account of 
these alterations was given to the public, in 1754. Dr. 
Reid was in favor of one professor teaching the whole or the 
greater part of the curriculum, and therefore did not follow 
the plan of confining the professors to separate branches, as 
had been done in Glasgow since 1727, and at Marischal College 
since 1723. The plan of a seven-months' session, after a trial 
of five years, was abandoned." l 

In Aberdeen he was surrounded by an able body of col- 
leagues in the two universities, by not a few thoughtful and 
accomplished men, ministers and professional men of the 
town and neighborhood ; and he had under him a succession 

1 MS. notes furnished me by Thomson of Banchory. 



202 THOMAS REID. [Art. xxvi. 

of shrewd students, whom he conducted, in a series of years, 
through all the higher branches. He managed to bring to- 
gether the literary and scientific men by means of the famous 
" Aberdeen Philosophical Society," which he was the main in- 
strument in founding, and which helped to call forth and 
combine what may be called the Aberdeen branch of the 
Scottish philosophy. To that society he contributed a series 
of papers containing most of the views which were after- 
wards embodied in the work which established his repu- 
tation, " An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles 
of Common Sense." That work was published in 1764. 

In the end of 1763, he was invited by the University of 
Glasgow to the professorship of moral philosophy there, and 
entered upon his duties the following year. In this new sphere 
he confined his instructions to the intellectual and active powers 
of man, and unfolded a system of ethics comprising some 
general views with respect to natural jurisprudence and the 
fundamental principles of politics ; he delivered, besides, a few 
lectures on rhetoric to an advanced class. We have here a 
sketch of him by his most distinguished pupil and biographer : 
" In his elocution and mode of instruction there was nothing 
peculiarly attractive. He seldom, if ever, indulged himself in 
the warmth of extempore discourse ; nor was his manner of 
reading calculated to increase the effect of what he had com- 
mitted to writing. Such, however, was the simplicity and 
perspicuity of his style, such the gravity and authority of his 
character, and such the general interest of his young hearers 
in the doctrines which he taught, that, by the numerous audi- 
ences to which his instructions were addressed, he was heard, 
uniformly, with the most silent and respectful attention. On 
this subject I speak from personal knowledge, having had the 
good fortune during a considerable part of the winter of 1772 
to be one of his pupils." 

We have preserved letters 1 of his to his old Aberdeen 
friends, Dr. Andrew Skene and Dr. David Skene, which give us 
glimpses of the Glasgow college life of the period. — " Glasgow, 
Nov. 14, 1764. I must launch forth in the morning so as to be 
at the college (which is a walk of eight minutes), half an hour 
after seven o'clock, when I speak for an hour, without inter- 

1 MS. letters possessed by Thomson of Banchory. 



Art. xxvi.] IN GLASGOW COLLEGE. 20$ 

ruption, to an audience of about a hundred. At eleven, I 
examine for an hour upon my morning prelection, but my 
audience is little more than a third part of what it was in the 
morning. In a week or two, for three days of the week, I have 
a second prelection at twelve, upon a different subject, when my 
audience will be made up of those who hear me in the morning, 
but do not attend at eleven. My hearers attend my class two 
years at least. The first session they attend the morning prelec- 
tion and the time of examination at eleven ; the second and sub- 
sequent years they attend the two prelections, but not the hour 
of examination. They pay fees for the first two years ; and 
then they are cives of that class, and may attend gratis as many 
years as they please. Many attend the moral philosophy class 
four or five years, so that I have many preachers and students 
of divinity and law of considerable standing, before whom I 
stand in awe to speak without more preparation than I have 
leisure for. I have great inclination to attend some of the pro- 
fessors here, several of whom are very eminent in their way, 
but I cannot find much leisure. Much time is consumed in 
our college in business meetings, of which we have, commonly, 
four or five in the week. We have a literary society once 
a week, consisting of the masters and two or three more, 
where each of the members has a discourse once in the ses- 
sion. The professors of humanity, Greek, logic, and natural 
philosophy, have as many as I have, some of them more. All 
the other professors, except one, teach at least one hour a 
day, and we are no less than fourteen in number. The hours 
of the different professors are different, so far as can be, that 
the same student may attend two or three, or perhaps more, at 
the same time. Near a third part of our students are Irish. 
Thirty came over lately in one ship, besides those that went 
to Edinburgh. We have a good many English, and some for- 
eigners. Many of the Irish, as well as Scotch, are poor and 
came up late to save money, so that we are not fully convened, 
though I have been teaching ever since the ioth of October. 
Those who pretend to know say that the number of students 
this year, when fully convened, will amount to 300. The mas- 
ters live in good habits with one another, and manage their 
political differences with good manners, although with a 
good deal of intrigue and secret caballing when there is an 
election." 



204 THOMAS RE ID. [Art. xxvi. 

A year after we have another picture of his collegiate posi- 
tion. " Our college is considerably more crowded than it was 
last session. My class indeed is much the same as last year, 
but all the rest are better. I believe the number of our stu- 
dents of one kind or other may be between four and five 
hundred. But the College of Edinburgh is increased this 
year much more than we are. The professor, Ferguson, is 
indeed as far as I can j udge a man of noble spirit, of very ele- 
gant manners, and has a very uncommon flow of eloquence. I 
hear he is about to publish, I do not know under what title, a 
natural,, history of man, exhibiting a view of him in the savage 
state, and in the several successive states of pasturage, agricul- 
ture, and commerce." " The most disagreeable thing in the 
teaching part is to have a great number of stupid Irish teagues 
who attend classes for two or three years, to qualify them for 
teaching schools or being dissenting teachers. I preach to 
these as St. Thomas did to the fishes. I do not know what 
pleasure he had in his audience ; but I should have none in mine 
if there was not in it a mixture of reasonable creatures. I con- 
fess I think there is a smaller portion of these in my class this 
year than there was the last, although the number on the whole 
was not less. I have long been of opinion that in a right con- 
stituted college there ought to be two professors for each class, — 
one for the dunces, and another for those who have parts. The 
province of the former would not be the most agreeable ; but 
perhaps it would require the greatest talents, and therefore 
ought to be accounted the post of honor. There is no part of 
my time more disagreeably spent than that which is spent in 
college meetings, of which we have often five or six a week." 
"These meetings are become more disagreeable by an evil 
spirit of party, that seems to put us in a ferment ; and I am 
afraid will produce bad consequences." We have here glimpses 
of the evils arising from the college patronage being so largely 
vested in a limited self -elected body, who turned it to party and 
family ends. As to the roughness of the Irish teagues (colts) 
which seems partly to have amused, and partly to have alarmed 
him, the blame of it is partly to be charged on the college 
itself, which received these students too eagerly, and allowed 
them to graduate too easily after a shorter period of attend- 
ance than the Scottish youths. The presbyterian youth of 



Art. xxvi.] THE GLASGOW PEOPLE. 205 

Ulster — shut out from Dublin University, owing to its sectarian 
character — received from Glasgow, if not a refined, a very useful 
education, which enabled them, as ministers, doctors, and teach- 
ers, to raise their province above the other districts of Ireland 
in industry and intelligence. 

As it is interesting to notice the Aberdeen philosopher's 
view of the frolicsome Irish youth, so it is instructive to observe 
the estimate by the Aberdeen moderate of the Calvinistic relig- 
ion of the land of the covenant. Writing to Aberdeen, July 13, 
1765 : " I think the common people here and in the neighbor- 
hood, greatly inferior to the common people with you. They 
are Boeotian in their understandings, fanatic in their religion, 
and clownish in their dress and manners. The clergy encour- 
age this fanaticism too much, and find it the only way to 
popularity. I often hear a gospel here which you know nothing 
about ; for you neither hear it from the pulpit nor will you find 
it in the Bible." Possibly this gospel was the very gospel of 
grace so valued by the people of the west of Scotland. It is 
possible, too, that at this time, when the contest between the 
refined moral system and the evangelical system was the 
closest and keenest, Dr. Reid may have been kept at a distance 
from the latter. In another letter he sees some of the more 
favorable features of the western character. " The common 
people have a gloom in their countenance which I am at a loss 
whether to ascribe to their religion or to the air and climate. 
There is certainly more of religion among the common people 
in this town than in Aberdeen, and although it has a gloomy 
enthusiastic cast, yet I think it makes them tame and sober. 
I have not heard either of a house or head broke, of a pocket 
pict [picked], or of any flagrant crime, since I came here. I 
have not heard any swearing in the streets, nor seen a man 

drunk (excepting, inter nos, one prof r), since I came here." 

The Aberdeen moderate is not prepossessed in favor of the 
west-country religion, but testifies in behalf of the west-country 
morality. He has an idea that the morality may somehow be 
connected with the religion ; and possibly he might have seen 
more amiability and cheerfulness in the piety of the common 
people had he come in closer contact with it. It is significant 
that the drunk man is to be found in the class which had 
risen above the national faith. We shall have to look at a very 



206 THOMAS RE ID. [Art. xxvi. 

different picture half a century later, when Chalmers begins his 
labors in Glasgow. By that time, under the moderate regime, 
both morality and religion have disappeared from the region 
(Drygate) in which Reid lived. The Glasgow professors may 
not have been directly responsible for the growing wickedness ; 
but there was nothing in their teaching, moral or theological, 
adequate to the task of purifying the pollution coagulating all 
around them. 

There are indications in these letters of the interest taken by 
Reid in every sort of scientific pursuit. He confidentially 
reports to Dr. David Skene Dr. Black's theory of heat before 
it was made known to the world. He is aiding a Turin pro- 
fessor of medicine who comes to Glasgow in his inquiries about 
the petrifaction of stones. He sends philosophical instruments 
to his friends in Aberdeen (Feb. 25, 1767). " For my part, if 
I could find a machine as proper for analyzing ideas, moral 
sentiments, and other materials belonging to the Fourth King- 
dom, I believe I should find in my heart to bestow the money 
for it. I have the more use for a machine of this kind, because 
my alembic for performing these operations — I mean my cra- 
nium — has been a little out of order this winter by vertigo, 
which has made my studies go on heavily, though it has not 
hitherto interrupted my teaching." 

Thus flowed along, quietly and honorably, the remaining days 
of Dr. Reid. He corresponded with Lord Kames and Dr. 
James Gregory on such subjects as liberty, cause, motives, 
and volition. The letters have been published. Many of them 
are controversial, but they are conducted in an admirable spirit. 
He wrote a number of papers of some value, apparently for 
the literary society of Glasgow. In particular, he has " Some 
Observations on the Modern System of Materialism," meaning 
by Materialism that advanced by Dr. Priestley in his " Disquisi- 
tions relating to Matter and Spirit" (1777), and "A free 
Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism and Philosophical 
Necessity" (1777). This paper appears in no fewer than five 
forms, showing what pains he had taken with it. One or two of 
the forms look like mere notes or preparations, the other three 
are fully written out. It is of a thorough and searching charac- 
ter, distinguished for acuteness beyond almost any of his pub- 
lished writings, and written with great point and naivete. He 



Art. xxvi.] HIS PHILOSOPHY. 207 

also wrote " Miscellaneous Reflections on Priestley's Account of 
Hartley's Theory of the Human Mind." He speaks with great 
fondness and respect of Hartley, but shows that his doctrines 
were unfounded hypotheses. He is severe upon Priestley's 
application of Hartley's theories, and examines the attempt to 
explain the memory, and the mental faculties generally, and the 
passions and volitions, by association. 1 But the principal work 
of his declining life consisted in writing his " Essays on the 
Intellectual Powers of Man," published in 1785, and the " Essays 
on the Active Powers," which appeared in 1788. 

Underneath the calm, unpretentious demeanor, there was a 
deep fountain of devout feeling ready to burst out on certain 
occasions. Again we are told that, in dispensing the sacra- 
ment of the Lord's supper, he could not refer to the love of 
Christ without tears running down his eyes. 2 In the autumn 
of 1796, he had repeated strokes of palsy, and he died Oct. 7th. 
His daughter Mrs. Carmichael writes : " His piety and resigna- 
tion never forsook him in times of deepest affliction, and in all 
his distress during his last illness. Such is the blessed effect 
of the power of religion, and of a conscience void of offence 
towards God and man." 3 

Turning now to the philosophy of Reid, we find it distin- 
guished throughout by independence of thought and a love of 
truth. He admires the genius of those who were rulers in the 
world of speculation in his time, but he does not follow them. 
He might have been inclined to do so, but he was staggered by 
the consequences which had been drawn by Hume ; and this 
led him to review the philosophy that prevailed in his time, 
and which claimed as its authors the illustrious names of Des- 
cartes, Locke, and Berkeley. The consequence is, that his 
works, though expository throughout, have all along a polemical 
front, but always bearing a calm, a polite, and benignant aspect. 
We cannot understand his philosophy, and we cannot appreci- 
ate his originality, unless we bear this circumstance in mind, 
which, I may add, we are not likely to forget, as he is constantly 
referring to some one or other of these authors. He claims 

1 MS. papers of Dr. Reid, in possession of Francis Edmond, Esq. 

2 Life of Dr. McKinlay of Kilmarnock, prefixed to a volume of his " Ser- 
mons." 

3 MS. papers in possession of Francis Edmond. 



208 THOMAS RE ID. [Art. xxvi. 

credit in regard to two points, — one in examining and under- 
mining the ideal theory of sense-perception, the other in estab- 
lishing the doctrine of common sense. These are the topics 
on which I mean chiefly to dwell in the exposition and criticism 
of his two works. 

His " Inquiry " is occupied almost exclusively with the 
senses. It is one of the excellencies of his philosophy as com- 
pared with those that have gone before, and most of those 
that have appeared since his time, that he so carefully inquired 
into these original inlets of knowledge. In doing so, he shows 
that he is acquainted with all that had been done in physiology 
down to his time, and that he had been in the way of making 
original observations. He goes over the senses one by one, 
beginning with the simpler, smelling and tasting ; and going 
on to the more complex, hearing, touch, and seeing. Under 
smelling he announces a number of general principles appli- 
cable to all the senses, as in regard to sensation considered 
absolutely, and the nature of judgment and belief. Under hear- 
ing he speaks of natural language ; and under touch, of natural 
signs and primary qualities. He dilates at greatest length on 
sight : discussing such topics as color, visible figure, extension, 
the parallel motion of the eyes, squinting, and Berkeley's 
theory of vision. He treats them physiologically, so far as 
physiology could then carry him ; but he treats them also, which 
so many later German and British psychologists do not, in the 
light of the revelations of consciousness. He takes up the 
same subject in the earlier parts of his " Essays." 

" All philosophers, from Plato to Hume, agree in this that we 
do not perceive external objects immediately, and that the 
immediate object of perception must be some image present 
to the mind." He shows that no solid proof has been advanced 
of the existence of the ideas ; that they are a mere fiction 
and hypothesis, contrived to solve the phenomena of the human 
understanding ; that they do not at all answer this end ; and 
that this hypothesis of ideas or images of things, in the mind 
or in the sensorium, is the parent of foolish paradoxes. 

Let us try to determine precisely his doctrine as to percep- 
tion by the senses. Negatively : he denies, first, that we perceive 
by means of ideas, in the mind or out of it, coming between the 
mind and the material object perceived ; secondly, that we 



Art. xxvi.] OPPOSES IDEAL THEORY. 209 

reach a knowledge of the external object by means of reason- 
ing ; and, thirdly, that, in order to the conception of any thing, 
it is necessary to have some impression or idea in our minds 
which resembles it, particularly setting himself against the 
doctrine of Locke, that our ideas of the primary qualities are 
resemblances of them. What he advances on these points 
seems to me clear, full, and satisfactory. He has done special 
service to philosophy by removing these. confusing and trouble- 
some intermediaries which were called ideas. It may be that 
the great body of philosophers had not drawn out for their 
own use such a doctrine of ideas as Reid exposes ; it may be 
that some of them, if the question had been put to them, would 
have denied that they held any such doctrine ; it may be, as 
Hamilton has tried to show, that some few held a doctrine of 
perception without ideas : but I believe that Reid was right 
in holding that mental philosophers generally did bring in an 
idea between the mind perceiving and the external object ; that 
some objectified the internal thought, and confounded it with 
the object perceived ; that others created an image in the 
mind or in the brain ; and that some had not clearly settled 
what they meant by the term they employed. I believe he is 
right when he says generally, that " ideas being supposed to be 
a shadowy kind of beings, intermediate between the thought 
and the object of thought, sometimes seem to coalesce with the 
thought, sometimes with the object of thought, and sometimes 
to have a distinct existence of their own." I am sure that 
the discussion in which he engaged has been of great utility 
in compelling those philosophers who still use the word " idea " to 
tell us what they mean by it, and of still greater utility in lead- 
ing so many to abandon the use of the phrase altogether in 
strictly philosophic investigations. 

I am not to enter deeply into the interminable discussions 
as to the sense in which the word " idea " has been used by 
Descartes and Locke. Hamilton says that by the phrase Des- 
cartes " designated two very different things ; viz., the proximate 
bodily antecedent and the mental consequence." ('■ Works," p. 
273.) As to the meaning which Locke attached to the term, I 
must content myself with referring to the discussions of Stewart, 
Brown, andHamilton. After reading these with care, I am con- 
vinced that the following observations of Reid are as just as 

14 



210 THOMAS REID. [Art. xxvi. 

they are important : " Perhaps it was unfortunate for Mr. Locke 
that he used the word idea so very frequently as to make it very 
difficult to give the attention necessary to put it always to the 
same meaning. And it appears evident that, in many places, 
he means nothing more by it but the notion or conception we 
have of any object of thought ; that is, the act of the mind in 
conceiving it, and not the object conceived." But then he fre- 
quently uses it to signify "the images of external things in the 
mind." " There is a third sense in which he uses the word not 
unfrequently, — to signify objects of thought that are not in 
the mind, but external." " Thus we see that the word idea has 
three different meanings in the ' Essay ; ' and the author seems 
to have used it sometimes in one, sometimes in another, without 
being aware of any change in the meaning. The reader slides 
easily into the same fallacy, that meaning occurring most 
readily to his mind which gives the best sense to what he 
reads." It is specially true of Locke what Reid affirms gener- 
ally : " The way in which philosophers speak of ideas seems 
to imply that they are the only objects of perception" (p. 263). 
The service which Reid has done to philosophy by banish- 
ing these intermediaries between perception and its external 
object cannot be over-estimated. He has also been success- 
ful in proving that it cannot be by a process of reasoning 
that we reach the conception of, and belief in, the existence of 
body. There is nothing in any organic affection of the nerves or 
brain, nothing in the sensation in the mind, to entitle us to believe 
in an extended resisting object. He also deserves great credit 
for showing so clearly that the conceptions of the qualities of 
matter are not to be supposed to have a resemblance to the 
qualities themselves. Locke acknowledges as to the secondary 
qualities of matter that the ideas are not to be regarded as 
being like them ; but he still talked of ideas of the primary 
qualities as being resemblances. This may have been little 
else than loose language on the part of Locke, to indicate that 
there was a correspondence or relation of some kind ; but it 
was desirable to correct it, as it was fitted to convey a very 
erroneous impression. In a later age, Hamilton exposed thor- 
oughly the more general error, that like can only influence like, 
and that like can only be known by like. It is disheartening 
to think how much of the energy of our greatest thinkers has 



Art. xxvi.] ON PERCEPTION. 211 

been spent in correcting errors which other great thinkers have 
introduced. It looks as if it were only by a continued struggle 
that truth is to gain a victory over error. 

He has not been so successful in establishing a doctrine of 
his own as in opposing the errors of others. But his view of 
perception, whether we approve of it or not, can be understood 
by us. He maintains that there is first a sensation in the 
mind, and that this sensation suggests a perception. The word 
suggestion to denote the rise of a thought in the mind, was em- 
ployed by earlier philosophers, but was adopted by Reid from 
Berkeley, who again took it from Locke. Reid maintains that 
" there are natural suggestions ; particularly that sensation 
suggests the notion of present existence, and the belief that 
what we perceive or feel does now exist ; that memory suggests 
the notion of past existence, and the belief that what we re- 
member did exist in time past ; and that our sensations and 
thoughts do also suggest the notion of a mind, and the belief 
of its existence and of its relation to our thoughts. By a like 
natural principle it is, that a beginning of existence, or any 
change in nature, suggests to us the notion of a cause and com- 
pels our belief in its existence. . . . And, in like manner, cer- 
tain sensations of touch, by the constitution of our nature, 
suggest to us extension, solidity, and motion." (" Works," 
p. in.) Closely connected or rather identical with this theory 
of suggestion is his doctrine of natural language and signs, — a 
phraseology also taken from Berkeley. He maintains that 
there are natural signs, " which, though we never had any no- 
tion or conception of the thing signified, do suggest it, or con- 
jure it up, as it were by a natural kind of magic, and at once 
give us a conception and create a belief in it." He calls " our 
sensations signs of external objects." The operations are repre- 
sented by him as " simple and original, and therefore inexplica- 
ble, acts of the mind." 

The whole account seems to me unsatisfactory, nearly as 
much so as the ideal hypothesis. There is no evidence that 
sensation comes before perception. The two are thus dis- 
tinguished by Reid : " When I smell a rose, there is in this 
operation both sensation and perception. The agreeable odor 
I feel, considered by itself, without relation to any external 
object, is merely a sensation." The quality in the rose which 



212 THOMAS RE ID. [Art. xxvi. 

produces the sensation "is the object perceived, and that act of 
my mind by which I have the conviction and belief of this 
quality is what I call perception." (310.) These two seem to 
me to constitute one concrete act, and they can be separated 
only by a process of abstraction. There is not first a sensa- 
tion of a colored surface, and then a perception of it ; but 
we have the two at once. This does away with the neces- 
sity of signs and suggestions, which might be quite as trouble- 
some intermediaries as ideas. It would be better to say that, 
upon certain affections of sense being conveyed to the mind, 
it knows (this is a better phrase than conceive, or than believe 
iii) at once the colored surface. 

Hamilton, when he began to edit Reid, thought that Reid's 
doctrine was the same as his own. But, as he advances, he sees 
that it is not so ; and he comes to doubt whether, after all, Reid 
held the doctrine to which he himself adhered so tenaciously, — ■ 
that of immediate perception. Reid does, indeed, represent 
perception as immediate ; meaning that it is direct, and with- 
out a process of reasoning. Yet he tells us that, " although 
there is no reasoning in perception, yet there are certain means 
and instruments, which, by the appointment of nature, must in- 
tervene between the object and our perception of it ; and by 
these our perceptions are limited and regulated." Surely Ham- 
ilton himself will admit that there are such means in the action 
of the senses, of the nerves, and the brain, without which 
there can be no perception. Reid indeed calls in more of such 
anterior processes than Hamilton does ; in particular, he calls 
in signs and suggestions, and makes sensation come before 
perception. But, after all, the two agree in the main point. 
While both allow, as all men do, that there are processes prior 
to the perception, both agree that when the mind is perceiving, 
it is perceiving not an idea, or even a sensation or suggestion, 
but an external extended object. 

On one point, however, and this not an unimportant one, 
Reid and his commentator do differ ; and that is as to what 
should be represented as the object of perception. Locke 
means by idea, " whatever is the object of the understanding 
when it thinks." But the word object, in such a connection, 
may be as ambiguous as idea. Reid speaks of the stars as the 
objects before the mind when we look into the heavens. Ham- 



Art. xxvi.] HIS ACCOUNT OF PERCEPTION. 213 

ilton says that the object is the rays of light reaching the eye. 
He maintains that in perception the proper object is not a distant 
one, but is either the organism or the objects in contact with 
the organism. Physiological research seems to show that in 
this respect Hamilton is right. But still it is true that, what- 
ever be the immediate object, the distant star, and not the rays 
of light, does become, always by an easy process of observa- 
tion and inference, the main object contemplated. The two 
are agreed that the object is an external extended one ; is, in 
short, a natural object, and not an idea in the mind, or a mod- 
ification of the mind. 

Let us attend a little more carefully to the view which he 
gives of perception proper. " If, therefore, we attend to that 
act of our mind which we call the perception of an external 
object, we shall find in it these three things : First, some con- 
ception or notion of the object perceived ; secondly, a strong 
and irresistible conviction and belief of its present existence ; 
thirdly, that this conviction and belief are immediate, and not the 
effect of reasoning." (" Works," p. 258.) The two first of these 
he discovers by an analysis of the concrete act. They are not 
happily expressed. The better statement is, that in perception 
we know at once the object ; and this knowledge embraces 
what he calls the "notion" or " conception," — phrases which 
should be reserved for the abstract and general notions which 
are formed by a subsequent discursive process, — and also what 
he calls the conviction and belief, which latter phrase should 
be confined, I think, to the conviction which we have of ob- 
jects not now present, to objects of faith as distinguished from 
objects of sight or sense generally. By giving this account we 
are saved from being obliged to represent such ideas as exten- 
sion as concomitants of our perceptions. The correct state- 
ment is that, by sight and touch, — I believe by all the senses, — 
we know objects as extended; and we can then separate, by 
abstraction, the extension from the other parts of our concrete 
cognition, and can also inquire what intuitive convictions are 
involved in it. Hamilton, venturing " a step beyond Reid and 
Stewart, no less than Kant " has fallen into the awkwardness 
of calling in both an a priori conception with Kant, and an 
a posteriori perception with Reid. (p. 126.) Our cognition of 
extension is just one experience, but involves certain intuitive 
convictions. 



214 THOMAS REID. [Art. xxvi. 

Reid, like Locke, draws the distinction between the primary 
and secondary qualities of matter ; but he grounds it on a 
different principle. According to Locke, primary qualities are 
" such as are utterly inseparable from the body in what state 
soever it be." (" Essay" II., 8.) According to Reid, " the dis- 
tinction is this, that our senses give us a direct and a distinct 
notion of the primary qualities, and inform us what they are in 
themselves. But of the secondary our senses give us only a 
relative and obscure notion. They inform us only that they 
are qualities that affect us in a certain manner ; that is, pro- 
duce in us a certain sensation : but, as to what they are in 
themselves, our senses leave us in the dark." He says more 
expressly : " Of some things, we know what they are in them- 
selves : our conceptions of such things I call direct. Of other 
things, we know not what they are in themselves, but only that 
they have certain properties or attributes, or certain relations to 
other things : of these our conception is only relative." (p. 513.) 
Hamilton remarks that " by the expression, ' what they are in 
themselves,' in reference to the primary qualities, and of 'relative 
notion ' in reference to the secondary, Reid cannot mean that the 
former are known to us absolutely and in themselves ; that is, 
out of relatio7i to our cognitive faculties." (pp. 313, 314.) Cer- 
tainly Reid was not dealing with such ideas as the absolute, 
and things " out of relation to our faculties : " these are phrases 
and distinctions belonging to a very different philosophy. He 
means that, when we look on a material object, we are led to 
believe it to be extended ; whereas, when we experience the 
sensation of heat, we simply know that there must be an ex- 
ternal object causing it, without knowing what it is. When 
physical science shall have thrown farther light on the qualities 
of bodies, I should like to have the distinction between the pri- 
mary and secondary qualities of bodies reviewed by a compe- 
tent philosopher. For the present, the distinction, as drawn by 
Reid, seems to me to be upon the whole the best : " The no- 
tion we have of primary qualities is direct, and not relative 
only." Hamilton might have done well, in reference to his 
own theory of relativity, to ponder the statement of Reid : " A 
relative notion of a thing is, strictly speaking, no notion of the 
thing at all, but only of some relation which it bears to some- 
thing else." 



Art. xxvi.] HIS DIVISION OF THE FACULTIES. 21$ 

The substance of the " Essays on the Intellectual Powers 
of Man," was delivered annually, for more than twenty years, 
in lectures to his class in the University of Glasgow, and for 
several years before in Aberdeen. He commences with such 
topics as the explication of words, principles taken for granted, 
analogy, the proper means of knowing the operations of the 
mind, the difficulty of attending to the operations of the mind, 
on all of which he has remarks characterized by much sound 
sense and fitted to be eminently useful to those entering on the 
study of the human mind. He closes Essay I. with a classifi- 
cation of the mental powers : i. The powers we have by means 
of our external senses ; 2. Memory ; 3. Conception ; 4. The 
power of resolving and analyzing complex objects, and com- 
pounding those that are simple ; 5. Judging ; 6. Reasoning ; 
7. Taste ; 8. Moral perception ; and, last of all, consciousness. I 
may offer a few remarks on each of these. 

Perception. After the full discussion in which we have been 
engaged in reviewing his " Inquiry," it is not needful to dwell 
on this subject. A large portion of Essay II. is occupied with 
a review of the " sentiments of philosophers about the percep- 
tion of external objects," such as the Peripatetics, Malebranche, 
Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Arnauld, and Leibnitz. 
His account of the opinions of these men is marked by great 
conscientiousness and candor : it is generally clear, often 
searching, always characterized by plain sense, at times super- 
ficial and mistaken. Hamilton has shown that Reid has fallen 
into gross blunders from not having mastered, as a whole, the 
higher speculative systems, such as those of Aristotle, Des- 
cartes, and Leibnitz. Hamilton's notes should always be read 
with Reid's exposition. These notes are as valuable for their 
logical acumen and erudition, as the text is for its indepen- 
dence and its homely sense. 

Memory. His analysis of this power, which will be found to 
contain such elements as retention, phantasy, association, and 
recognition, is not at all searching. But he is successful in 
showing that it is an original faculty, and he has a number of 
useful, though somewhat superficial, remarks upon its mode 
of operation. He describes memory as giving us an immedi- 
ate knowledge of things past, which leads to a very severe 
criticism by Hamilton, who remarks that an immediate knowl- 



2l6 THOMAS RE ID. [Art. xxvi. 

edge of things past is a contradiction. But Reid does not use 
the word ' immediate ' in the same rigid sense as Hamilton : 
all that he means is that, in our recognition of the past, there 
is no reasoning or any other discursive process. Hamilton 
is right when he says that the immediate object before the 
mind is a phantasm or representation in the mind ; but it is 
also true that in memory we go intuitively, beyond the represen- 
tation in the mind, to the past occurrence which it represents. 
Reid says that " our notion of duration, as well as our belief 
in it, is got by the faculty of memory." Whereon Hamilton 
remarks that this is to make " time an empirical or generalized 
notion," and then tells us that time is a necessary notion, aris- 
ing on the occasion of experience. But Reid's doctrine is the 
more correct of the two. In every act of memory we have the 
remembrance of an event in time past, and have thus the idea 
of time in the concrete, and get the idea of time in the abstract 
by separating the time from the event ; and upon reflection we 
discover that there are necessary convictions involved in our 
belief in time. Reid's account of the idea of time, though not 
exhaustive, is thus correct so far as it goes. By not calling in 
a faculty of recognition, Hamilton has not been able to show 
how we get the idea of time, and has been obliged with Kant 
to make it some sort of a priori form. 

Conception. Under this phrase he includes three things. 
" They are either the conceptions of individual things, the creat- 
ures of God ; or they are conceptions of the meaning of general 
words ; or they are the creatures of our own imagination." He 
has sensible remarks as to each of these, but not a good no- 
menclature to indicate the distinctions. It is in this essay 
that he treats of the train of thought in the mind, which he 
does in a superficial manner, compared even with his prede- 
cessors Turnbull and Hutcheson. 

Abstraction. He does not distinguish so carefully as he should 
have done between the abstract and general notion. He has a 
glimpse of the distinction between the comprehension and 
extension of a general conception. " The species comprehends 
all that is in the genus, and those attributes, likewise, which 
distinguish that species from others belonging to the same 
genus, and, the more subdivisions we make, the names of the 
lower become still the more comprehensive in their significa- 



Art. xxvi.] TWO DEGREES OF REASON. 2iy 

tion, but the less extensive in their application to individuals." 
(p. 391.) In regard to the subjects discussed by the nominal- 
ists, realists, and conceptualists, he is a moderate conceptual- 
ise dwelling fondly on the necessity of observing the points 
of resemblance in the objects placed in the group. He has 
some good remarks on the formation of general notions, but 
does not discover — what is, after all, the essential point — the 
putting together in the class all the objects possessing the 
common attribute, or attributes, fixed on. His realistic ten- 
dency is seen in the remark : " When I speak of general notions, 
or general conceptions, I always mean things conceived, and 
not the act of the mind in conceiving them." (p. 404.) 

yudginent. Under this head we are introduced to the full 
discussion of his favorite subject, common sense, which he says 
means common judgment. " We ascribe to reason two offices, 
or two degrees. The first is to judge of things self-evident ; 
the second, to draw conclusions which are not self-evident 
from those that are. The first of these is the province and the 
sole province of common sense ; and therefore it coincides with 
reason in its whole extent, and is only another name for one 
branch or degree of reason." (p. 425.) He divides the principles 
of common sense into two classes : — as they are contingent ; 
or as they are necessary and immutable, whose contrary is im- 
possible. 

I. Principles of Common Sense relating to Contingent 

Truth. 

1. The existence of every thing of which I am conscious. 

2. The thoughts of which I am conscious are the thoughts 
of a being which I call myself, my mind, my person. 

3. Those things did really happen which I distinctly remem- 
ber. 

4. Our own personal identity and continued existence as far 
back as we remember distinctly. 

5. Those things do really exist which we distinctly perceive 
by our senses, and are what we perceive them to be. 

6. We have some degree of power over our actions, and the 
determinations of our wills. 

7. The natural faculties by which we distinguish truth from 
error are not fallacious. 



218 THOMAS RE ID. [Art. xxvi. 

8. There is life and intelligence in our fellow-men with whom 
we converse. 

9. That certain features of the countenance, sounds of the 
voice, and gestures of the body, indicate certain thoughts and 
dispositions of the mind. 

10. There is a certain regard due to human testimony in 
matters of fact, and even to human authority in matters of 
opinion. 

11. There are many events depending on the will of man in 
which there is a self-evident probability, greater or less accord- 
ing to circumstances. 

1 2. In the phenomena of nature, what is to be will probably 
be like to what has been in similar circumstances. 

II. Principles relating to Necessary Truths. 

1. Grammatical ; as, that every adjective in a sentence must 
belong to some substantive expressed or understood. 

2. Logical axioms ; such as, any contexture of words which 
does not make a proposition is neither true nor false. 

3. Mathematical axioms. 

4. Axioms in matters of taste. 

5. First Principles in Morals ; as, that an unjust action has 
more demerit than an ungenerous one. 

6. Metaphysical ; as that, — 

a. The qualities which we perceive by our senses must 

have a subject, which we call body ; and that 
the thoughts we are conscious of must have a 
subject, which we call mind. 

b. Whatever begins to exist must have a cause which 

produced it. 

c. Design and intelligence in the cause may be inferred 

with certainty from marks or signs of it in the 
effect. 

The first remark I have to make on this scheme is, that it 
may be doubted whether the distinction which he draws be- 
tween contingent and necessary truths is so profound as he 
would represent it. The test of the latter is that " their con- 
trary is impossible." But is it not true of all the truths of 
common sense when they are properly expressed, that their 
contrary or rather contradictory is impossible ? Thus take the 



Art. xxvi.] CRITICISM OF HIS PRINCIPLES. 219 

case of the intuitive conviction of our own existence. The 
conviction is not that I must have existed, but that " I do now 
exist ; " and of the contradictory of this, " I do not now exist," 
the conviction is as impossible as of the contradictory of the 
metaphysical principle of substance and quality, — namely, that 
this quality does not imply a substance. 

Looking to the account as a whole, including the division and 
arrangement, it seems to me sufficiently crude. Some of the 
principles enumerated under the head of contingent truths 
have no claim to be regarded as original laws of reason ; such 
as the signification of sounds of the voice, and gestures of the 
body, the belief in human testimony, and the uniformity of 
nature. These seem rather to be the result of a gathered expe- 
rience, to which we may be impelled by natural inclination ; and 
in all such cases the natural principle, which in the case of the 
uniformity of nature is the principle of cause and effect, should 
have been enunciated, and not the experiential rule. If these 
laws were principles of reason, there could be no exceptions to 
them : but every one knows that the sounds of the voice, and 
the expression of the countenance, and human testimony, may 
deceive ; and it is conceivable that the present order of things 
may be changed "as a vesture." I cannot see how, under the 
head of principles relating to necessary truth, he should in- 
clude convictions relating to so artificial a product as language. 
It may be argued, I think, that the principle of design is a 
modification of the principle of causality ; that is, discovering 
design as an effect, we argue an intelligent cause. By his loose 
statements he exposed himself to the criticism of Priestley, 1 who 

1 "An Examination of Dr. Reid's 'Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the 
Principles of Common Sense,' Dr. Beattie's 'Essay on the Nature and Immuta- 
bility of Truth,' and Dr. Oswald's ' Appeal to Common Sense in Behalf of Relig- 
ion,' " by Joseph Priestley, 1774. Reid's work appears to him "an ingenious 
piece of sophistry." He wonders that none of the Scottish writers (except 
Beattie) refer to Hartley. " Something was done in this field by Descartes, very 
much by Mr. Locke, but most of all by Dr. Hartley, who has thrown more useful 
light on the theory of the mind than Newton did upon the theory of the natural 
world." " The evidence that any two properties are necessarily united is the 
constant observation of their union." Propositions and reasoning " are in fact 
nothing more than cases of association of ideas." "There are many opinions 
which we know to be acquired, and even founded on prejudice and mistake, 
which, however, the fullest correction that they are void of all real foundation 
cannot erase from the mind ; the groundless belief and expectation founded upon 
it being so closely connected with the idea of certain circumstances, that no men- 



220 THOMAS RE ID. [Art. xxvi. 

objects to our regard for testimony as being a principle of com- 
mon sense. " It is a long time before a child hears any thing 
but truth, and therefore it can expect nothing else. The con- 
trary would be absolutely miraculous." But while Reid may 
be justly charged with a defect of critical analysis, and of cate- 
gorical expression, he has enunciated in a plain manner an 
immense body of important truth which can be shown to have 
the sanction of intuitive reason. 

The question has been much discussed, Where did Reid get 
the phrase common sense ? I believe it is not difficult to settle 
that question. The phrase was introduced formally into phi- 
losophy by Shaftesbury, who, however, shows that it was in use 
before. Reid has been charged with borrowing it without 
acknowledgment from Buffier, who certainly employs it in 
much the same sense as Reid. 1 But it might be argued with 
greater show of reason, but yet with no sufficient reason, that 
Buffier, who published his " First Truths " in 171 7, took it from 
Shaftesbury or those who were familiar with the writings of 
Shaftesbury, which became known on the Continent at an early 
date. It is certain that by the time of Reid the phrase was in 
constant use. 2 Even Berkeley says that " since his revolt from 
metaphysical notions to the plain dictates of nature and com- 

tal power of which we are possessed can separate them : " and he gives, as an 
example, our fear of ghosts. We see the commencement of the feud which cul- 
minated in John Stuart Mill's "Examination of Hamilton's Philosophy." But 
Priestley, like Mill, is obliged, unconsciously and surreptitiously, to call in first 
truths. " No man ever denied that there are self-evident truths, and that these 
must be assumed as the foundation of all our reasoning." " I never met with 
any person who did not acknowledge this." It is curious to find him saying that 
they "recommend particular positions as axioms, not as being founded on the 
perception of the agreement or disagreement of any ideas, which is the great doc- 
trine of Mr. Locke, and which makes truth depend upon the necessary nature of 
things, to be absolutely unchangeable and everlasting ; but merely some unaccount- 
able instinctive persuasions depending on the arbitrary constitution of our nat- 
ures." 

1 The translator of Buffier (1780) charges Reid with plagiarism. Dugald 
Stewart defends him ("Elements," vol. ii., pp. 63, 64) ; as does also Hamilton 
(Reid's "Collected Works," p. 789), who shows that Reid "only became ac- 
quainted with the treatise of Buffier after the publication of his own ' Inquiry ; ' 
for in his 'Account of Aristotle's Logic,' written and published some ten years 
subsequently to that work, he says, 'I have lately met with a very judicious 
treatise, written by Father Buffier.' " 

2 In "Scot's Magazine," February, 1847, was advertised "The Impartial Phi- 
losopher, or the Philosophy of Common Sense," by the Marquis d'Argens, in 
two volumes, 6s. 



Art. xxvi.] THE PHRASE "COMMON SENSE." 221 

mon sense he found his understanding strangely enlightened." 
(Preface to " Dialogues.") In the previous age philosophy had 
taken up a number of extreme positions, and those who were 
not ready to adopt them, and yet were not prepared to refute 
them by logic, were everywhere appealing to common sense. 

Notwithstanding the able and learned defence of the phrase 
by Hamilton, I look upon it as an unfortunate one. The word 
sense seems to associate the faculty with the bodily organism, 
with which certainly it has no connection. Still the term was 
so frequently used by Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson, who 
all talked not only of a bodily but an internal sense, while the 
two latter called in a moral sense and a sense of beauty, that 
it might, in accordance with established usage, be employed to 
indicate that the sense common to all mankind is an original 
inlet of knowledge, — an aspect often overlooked by those who 
represent it as an a priori form or regulative principle. By em- 
ploying the word, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Reid meant to 
intimate that there are other sources of ideas besides the exter- 
nal and internal senses, sensation and reflection. The funda- 
mental objection to the phrase " common" sense" is, that it is 
ambiguous. In saying so, I do not refer to the meaning attached 
to it by Aristotle, who denoted by xo/n) aiod^atg the knowledge 
imparted by the senses in common. This continued, for long, to 
be one of the meanings of the phrase in philosophy ; but by Reid's 
time it was thus known only to scholars. In the use which 
Reid makes of it, there is a fatal ambiguity. It is employed 
to signify two very different things. It denotes that combina- 
tion of qualities which constitutes good sense, being, according 
to an old saying, the most uncommon of all the senses. This 
valuable property is not common to all men, but is possessed 
only by a certain number ; and there are others who can never 
acquire it, and it is always the result of a number of gifts and 
attainments, such as an originally sound judgment and a care- 
ful observation of mankind and the world. In this signification 
common sense is not to be the final appeal in philosophy, sci- 
ence, or any other department of investigation ; though in all it 
may keep us from much error. Practical sense, as it claimed to 
be, long opposed the doctrine of there being an antipodes and of 
the earth moving ; it spoke contemptuously in the first instance 
of some of the greatest achievements of our world, the deeds 



222 THOMAS REID. [Art. xxvi. 

of philanthropists, and the sufferings of martyrs ; it laughed at 
the early poetry of Wordsworth and Tennyson. All that good 
sense can do in science and philosophy is to guard us against 
accepting any doctrine till it is settled by inductive proof. 

But the phrase has another and a different signification in 
the philosophical works, including Reid's, of last century. It 
denotes the aggregate of original principles planted in the 
minds of all, and in ordinary circumstances operating in the 
minds of all. It is only in this last sense that it can be legiti- 
mately employed in overthrowing scepticism, or for any philo- 
sophic purpose. Reid seeks to take advantage of both these 
meanings. He would show that the views he opposes, though 
supported by men of high intellectual power, — such as Locke, 
Berkeley, and Hume, — have the good sense of mankind against 
them. It can easily be shown that he employs the phrase 
once and again to designate sound practical judgment. He de- 
scribes Newton's " Regulae Philosophandi " as " maxims of com- 
mon sense." (p. 97.) He is constantly opposing common sense 
to reason and philosophy ; whereas he admits elsewhere, using 
the phrase in the other sense that " philosophy has no other 
root but the principles of common sense." (p. 101.) This dex- 
terous attempt to combine the two meanings, while perhaps 
contributing to the immediate popularity of Reid, and still more 
of Beattie, turned in the end against them (in the use of a two- 
edged sword, one edge is apt to wound him who uses it) in the 
estimation of philosophic thinkers, who, looking on the appeal 
as only to vulgar judgment, which may be prejudice, have denied 
the validity of the argument. 

Hamilton has succeeded, so I think, in showing that the 
argument as employed by Reid is valid in itself, and legiti- 
mately used against scepticism. His appeal is to principles in 
our constitution which all are obliged to admit and act upon. 
But an appeal in a loose way to a sense supposed to be in all 
men may be very illusive. In order to its philosophical appli- 
cation, it must be shown that the principle is in all men as a 
necessary principle ; and this Reid has commonly done, though 
there are cases, we have seen, in which he admits first prin- 
ciples too readily. But he should have done more : it is only 
when we have carefully ascertained the precise nature of the 
original perception, and expressed it in a law, that we are enti- 



Art. xxvi.] WHAT THE ULTIMATE APPEAL. 22$ 

tied to employ it in constructing a philosophy or in opposing 
scepticism. As long as it is a mere loose appeal to an undeter- 
mined principle, the argument may be very illusive. At this 
point Reid has often failed, owing to a deficiency of logical 
power. What he calls in is commonly a genuine mental prin- 
ciple ; but, owing to his not furnishing a rigid account of its 
nature and its laws, we may be in doubt whether the applica- 
tion which he makes of it is legitimate. The important work 
of Reid needs to be supplemented by an investigation, con- 
ducted in his own careful manner, of the precise nature of the 
principles of common sense, of their points of agreement and 
of difference, of their precise laws and varied modes of action. 

It is not easy to determine to what the appeal is ultimately 
to be in the philosophy of Reid. It is to common sense : but 
in what signification ? Because it is a sense ? Or because it 
is so constituted as to discern objects and truth? Or because 
it is common to all men ? Or because we must trust to it 
whether we will or no ? It is not easy to ascertain what would 
be Reid's, or even Hamilton's, answers to these questions. 
There are frequent passages in which Reid's appeal seems 
to be to the constitution of our minds (Hamilton's ultimate 
test, like Kant's, seems to be necessity); for he says, we "can- 
not have a better reason for trusting consciousness, than that 
every man, while his mind is sound, is determined by the con- 
stitution of his nature, to give implicit belief to it." But some 
one may ask, Why should we trust our constitution ? May 
not our constitution, common or individual, deceive us ? Has 
Hume succeeded in showing that our constitution followed out 
in different ways leads to contradictions ? To such questions 
Reid would have little else to say than that we must attend to 
these principles of common sense ; and this would make his 
appeal to be, like that of Kant and Hamilton, to stern necessity. 
It is worthy of being stated that, in his manuscript papers, 1 
an answer is attempted to some of these questions, and this of 
a more satisfactory kind than any thing I have noticed in his 
published writings. " As soon as this truth is understood, that 
two and two make four, I immediately assent to it ; because God 
has given me the faculty of immediately discerning its truth, and 
if I had not this faculty, I would not perceive its truth. The truth 

1 In possession of Francis Edmond. 



224 THOMAS REID. [Art. xxvi. 

itself, therefore, does not depend on my constitution ; for it was 
a truth before my existence, and will be a truth, although I were 
annihilated : but my perception evidently depends on my con- 
stitution, and particularly upon my having, as a part of my 
constitution, that faculty, whether you call it reason or com- 
mon sense, by which I perceive or discern this truth." " The 
truth of this proposition, that a lion is a ravenous beast, de- 
pends on the constitution of a lion, and upon nothing else." 
In like manner, as to right and wrong, " although the rectitude 
or depravity has a real existence in this case, yet it cannot be 
discerned by a spectator who has not the faculty of discerning 
objects of this kind." " Evidence is the sole and ultimate 
ground of belief, and self-evidence is the strongest possible 
ground of belief ; and he who desires reason for believing what 
is self-evident knows not what he means." Any one who 
would join into a consistent whole the various characteristics 
referred to in this paper, and give each its exact place, will 
advance a step beyond Reid, and, I may add, beyond Hamilton. 
The question occurs, Why has he not placed these statements 
in his published works ? Was it because he was not prepared 
to reduce them to a rigid consistency, and was averse to utter 
any thing which he could not stand by in every respect ? 

It is also worthy of being noticed that, in one of the manu- 
scripts, he shows that he had a glimpse of the distinction 
between what Kant calls analytic and synthetic judgments. 
The question is put, " Is there not a difference between the 
evidence of some first principles and others ? " and he answers, 
"There are various differences. This seems to be one, that, in 
some first principles, the predicate of the proposition is evi- 
dently contained in the subject, as in this, two and three are 
equal to five, a man has flesh and blood ; for, in these and the 
like self-evident principles, the subject includes the predicate in 
the very notion of it. There are other first principles in which 
the predicate is not contained in the notion of the subject, as 
when we affirm that a thing which begins to exist must have 
a cause." This last is an example of what Kant calls syn- 
thetic judgments a priori. Reid, however, has not laid hold of 
the distinction so firmly as Kant, nor did he see its importance, 
and elaborate it so fully as the great German metaphysician. 
It is interesting to notice these correspondences between the 
Scottish and German opponents of Hume. 



Art. xxvi.] THE ACTIVE POWERS. 225 

I do not mean to dwell on the remaining portion of the es- 
says, which contain many sound remarks, but little that is 
fresh and novel. 

Reasoning. This essay has nothing worthy of comment, 
except a vigorous attempt to show, as against Locke, that 
morality is not capable of demonstration. 

Taste. He argues that " it implies an original faculty, and 
that it is in the moral and intellectual perfections of mind, and 
in its active powers, that beauty originally dwells." In a letter 
to Rev. Archibald Alison, he claims : " I am proud to think 
that I first, in clear and explicit terms, and in the cool blood 
of a philosopher, maintained that all the beauty and sublimity 
of objects of sense is derived from the expression they ex- 
hibit of things intellectual, which alone have original beauty." 
(p. 89.) Possibly this may be a pretty close approximation to 
the truth. It seems to me to be a more just and enlightened 
view than that presented by Alison, and those Scotch meta- 
physicians who refer beauty to the association of ideas capable 
of raising feeling. 

Active Power in General. He argues resolutely, that we 
have an idea of active power, and examines the doctrines of 
Locke and Hume. It does not appear to him that there can 
be active power " in a subject which has no thought, no under- 
standing, no will." He maintains that natural philosophy, even 
if brought to perfection, " does not discover the efficient cause 
of any one phenomenon in nature." He draws the distinction 
between efficient and physical causes. " A physical cause is 
not an agent. It does not act, but is acted on, and is passive 
as to its effect." (p. 74.) He holds that it is the business of 
natural philosophy, to discover physical cause. On this, Cousin 
remarks that " to pretend that all cause is necessarily endowed 
with will and thought, is to deny all natural cause." The 
human race believes in the reality of natural causes : it believes 
that the fire burns, that the fire is the cause of pain which we 
feel, &c. ; and, at the same time, according as it reflects, it 
attaches all natural causes to their common and supreme princi- 
ple." When we discover a true physical cause, say that oxy- 
gen and hydrogen when joined in certain proportions, produce 
water, intuitive reason leads to believe that there is property, 
that is power, in the object; that the physical cause is truly 

15 



226 THOMAS REID. [Art. xxvi. 

an efficient cause ; and that the effect follows from a power in 
the agents. 

Will. He is a strenuous advocate of free-will. " Every 
man is conscious of a power to determine in things which he 
conceives to depend on his determination." He draws the 
distinction between desire and will. " The distinction is, that 
what we will must be an action, and our own action : what we 
desire may not be our own action ; it may be no action at all. 
The following statement is taken from the manuscripts : " I 
grant that all rational beings are influenced, and ought to be 
influenced, by motives. But the relation between a motive and 
the action is of a very different nature from the relation be- 
tween an efficient cause and its effect. An efficient cause 
must be a being that exists, and has power to produce the 
effect. A motive is not a thing that exists. It is only a thing 
conceived in the mind of the agent. Motives supply liberty in 
the agent, otherwise they have no influence at all." Such 
statements may not go down to the depths of this deep subject, 
but they are worthy of being considered and weighed. 

Principles of Action. By which he means "every thing that 
makes us to act." He divides them into mechanical, animal 
and rational. Under mechanical he includes instincts and 
habits. Under animal principles, appetites and desires, benev- 
olent affections and passions. The rational embrace a regard 
to our good upon the whole, the notions of duty, rectitude, and 
moral obligation ; and, in treating of these, he offers observations 
on conscience, maintaining that it is both an active and intel- 
lectual power. 

The Liberty of Moral Agents. He had entered on this sub- 
ject in treating of the will. He now discusses it more fully, 
showing that man has a power over the determination of his 
own will, and that we have by our constitution a natural con- 
viction or belief that we act freely. 

Morals. If he delivered nothing more to his class than is 
contained in this essay, it must have been a very defective 
system of moral philosophy ; but there is no reason to believe 
that he published all the instruction he conveyed in college. 
What he does say is always weighty. He shows that there 
are first principles in morals, that an action deserving moral 
approbation must be done with the belief of its being morally 



Art. xxvii.] THE ABERDEEN SOCIETY. 22J 

good. " Hence it follows necessarily that the moral goodness 
which we ascribe to an action considered abstractly, and that 
which we ascribe to a person for doing that action, are not the 
same." He is careful to explain that " morality requires not 
only that a man should act according to his judgment, but that 
he should use the best means in his power that his judgment 
be according to truth," thus pointing to a standard above the 
judgment. He argues powerfully against Hume that justice is 
a natural, and not a mere artificial, virtue. He maintains that 
we draw the sentiments of justice from conscience. That these 
sentiments are not the effects of education or acquired habits 
we have the same reason to conclude, as that our perception of 
what is true, and what is false, is not the effect of education or 
acquired habits." " By the conscience we perceive a merit in 
honest conduct, and a demerit in dishonest, without regard to 
public utility." He is particularly successful in proving that a 
contract implies an obligation, independent of the beneficial or 
prejudicial consequences that may follow. 



XXVII. — THE ABERDEEN PHILOSOPHICAL 
SOCIETY} 

This society deserves a special notice, as from it proceeded, directly or 
indirectly, the greater number of the works of the Aberdeen metaphysi- 
cians. The names of the members are worthy of being preserved, as they 
were all men of ability. The original members were Dr. John Gregory, 
Dr. David Skene, Mr. Robert Trail, Mr. George Campbell, Mr. John Stew- 
art, and Mr. Thomas Reid. In 1758, were elected Mr. Charles Gordon, 
Mr. Alexander Gerard, Mr. John Farquhar (minister at Nigg), and Mr. 
John Kerr. In later years were elected Mr. James Beattie in 1760, Dr. 
George Skene in 1763, Mr. W. Ogilvy in 1763, Mr. James Dunbar in 1765, 
and Mr. William Traill in 1766. Dr. Reid was secretary for the first year. 
The society met twice a month, in the afternoon or evening, in a tavern in 
one or other of the towns. We are amused at the provision made by the 
philosophers for their bodily wants. There was an entertainment, the 
expense of which was not to exceed eighteen pence a head ; the whole 
expense might be about ten shillings, of which one-half was for a bottle of 

1 Original minutes of the Society, kindly lent me by Francis Edmond ; " Bio- 
graphical Sketch of David Skene, M.D.," by Alexander Thomson of Banchory. 



228 THE ABERDEEN SOCIETY. [Art. xxvii. 

port, for punch and porter, the other half for the more solid eatables. It 
was a written rule, showing how anxious the grave men were to secure 
propriety, that "any member may take a glass at a by-table while the presi- 
dent is in the chair, but no health shall be drunk during that time." The 
meeting continued its sittings for three hours, there being room for free 
conversation half an hour before, and half an hour after, the president 
took or vacated the chair. The attendance may have averaged half a dozen. 
The first meeting was held Jan. 12, 1758. About 1772, the forfeits for non- 
attendance are getting heavy, and discontent is expressed. The minutes 
show a meeting so late as February, 1773, after which the society disap- 
pears. 

The society was formed for the purpose of reading discourses or dis- 
sertations, and making observations on the subjects of them, and of discuss- 
ing questions proposed and sanctioned. " The subjects of the discourses 
and questions shall be philosophical ; all grammatical, historical, and philo- 
logical discussions being conceived to be foreign to the design of this 
society [it is evident that they had no idea of the importance of philology]. 
And philosophical matters are understood to comprehend every principle of 
science, which may be deduced by just and lawful induction from the phe- 
nomena either of the human mind, or of the material world ; all observations 
and experiments that may furnish materials for such inductions ; the exami- 
nation of false schemes of philosophy and false methods of philosophizing ; 
the subserviency of philosophy to arts, the principles they borrow from it, 
and the means of carrying them to their perfection." 

It is interesting to notice that so many of the speculations of the Aber- 
deen philosophers, afterwards given to the world in their published writ- 
ings, were first laid before this society. Thus Dr. Reid, on May 24, 1758, 
intimates that the subject of his discourse at next meeting (June 13) is 
to be " The philosophy of the mind in general, and particularly on the per- 
ceptions we have by sight." In 1760, he gives an analysis of the senses, 
and a discourse on the sense of touch. On Jan. 26, 1762, he read a dis- 
course at the laying down of the office of president, on " Euclid's defini- 
tions and axioms." On Oct 11, 1762, Dr. Reid read a discourse, which 
the society approved of; but he declined inserting it, in regard he proposed 
soon to send it to the press, along with the other discourses he had read 
before the society. 

Gerard, too, discourses on his own subjects, from 1758 to 1771, and reads 
a series of papers on genius, and a paper on the effect of the passions 
on the association of our ideas. Between 1761 and 1768, he inquires: 
" What is peculiar to those Operations of the Mind of which we can form 
some Ideas, and what distinguishes them from other Operations of the Mind 
of which we can form no Ideas ? " He writes on the Principles which deter- 
mine our Degrees of Approbation in the Fine Arts ) upon the " Characters 
of Poetical Imagination ; " upon the " Difference between Common Sense 
and Reason ; " and he gives a series of papers on the " Universality and 
Immutability of the Moral Sentiment." From 176 1 to 1767, Dr. Campbell 
reads papers on " Eloquence ; " on " The Relation of Eloquence to Logic; " 
on " The Dependence of Eloquence on Grammar." 



Art. xxviii.] JAMES OSWALD. 229 

The other members take up cognate subjects. Traill takes "An Ab- 
stract of a Discourse of M. Rousseau, of the Sourse [so spelled] of the 
Inequality among Mankind." Mr. Gordon treats of " Memory and its 
Influence in forming Characters among Men ; " on the " Origin of Polythe- 
ism ; " on the Universal Belief in a Deity ; on the " Existence and Perfections 
of the Supreme Being ;" on "Language;" and on the "Alphabet." Far- 
quhar reads on the "Imagination," and a "Particular Providence." Dr. 
David Skene has a paper on "The Different Branches of Philosophy," 
particularly "The Study of the Nature and Philosophy of the Mind." 
Dr. Gregory discourses on " The Usefulness of Natural Philosophy ; " on 
The Prolongation of Human Life ; " "The Retardation of Old Age ; " and 
"The Foundation of Taste in Music." Mr. Ross takes up " The Use 
of the Leaves of Plants ; " and " The Methods of Classing Plants." Pro- 
fessor Stuart writes on the " Nature of Evidence ; " on " Mathematical 
Evidence ; " on the " Evidence of Experience ; " and " Moral Evidence." Dr. 
George Skene reads on " The Abuse of Mechanical Reasoning in Natural 
Philosophy." Mr. Traill discourses on " The Arrangement and Evidence 
of Mathematics ; " and Dunbar, on " The Union of King's and Mar- 
ischal Colleges," on "The Equality of Mankind," and "The Influence of 
Place and Climate upon Human Affairs." Dr. David Skene has a paper on 
" Happiness." Surely there is proof here of great intellectual activity, and 
of the keen interest felt in a wide range of subjects. 

Most of the topics discussed turn round the various departments of 
mental science and speculative philosophy. But it will be seen, from the 
list of questions propounded for discussion, that they travelled over other 
fields. Many of the discussions had a special reference to the new scepti- 
cal philosophy ; so that Reid could write to Hume, March 18, 1763: "Your 
friendly adversaries, Drs. Campbell and Gerard, as well as Dr. Gregory, 
return their compliments to you, respectfully. A little philosophical society 
here, of which all three are members, is much indebted to you for its enter- 
tainment. Your company would, although we are all good Christians, 
be more acceptable than that of Athanasius ; and since we cannot have you 
upon the bench, you are brought, oftener than any other man, to the bar ; 
accused and defended, with great zeal, but without bitterness. If you 
write no more in morals, politics, or metaphysics, I am afraid we shall be 
at a loss for subjects." 



XXVIII. — JAMES OSWALD. 

Priestley speaking of " a set of pretended philosophers, of whom the 
most conspicuous and assuming is Reid," says of Oswald, that he wonders 
how his "performance should have excited any other feeling than that of 
contempt." " As to Dr. Oswald, whom I have treated with the least cere- 
mony, the disgust his writings gave me was so great, that I could not pos- 
sibly show him more respect." ("Examination of Dr. Reid's Inquiry.") 
Oswald's work is entitled " An Appeal to Common Sense in behalf of 



230 JAMES BEATT1E. [Art. xxix. 

Religion." The first volume appeared in 1766, and it reached a second 
edition in 1768. The second volume was published in 1772. He takes 
substantially the same line of defence as Reid ; but the " Appeal" is less 
pointed, and is vastly looser than Reid's "Inquiry;" and one feels it a 
dreary task to go through its platitudes. He entrenches himself behind 
certain distinctions recognized in the age. " The distinction between the 
occasion and cause of a thing is too considerable to be overlooked in a 
philosophical inquiry. Sensation and reflection, do indeed give occasion 
to all our ideas, but do not therefore produce them. They may in our 
present state be considered as the sine qua non to our most rational and 
sublime conceptions, but are not therefore the powers by which we form 
them." He opposes Lord Karnes, and blames him for resting morality on 
feeling, and Adam Smith for resting it on sympathy, whereas it should be 
represented as founded on common sense. " Common sense perceives 
and pronounces upon all primary truths with the same indubitable cer- 
tainty with which we perceive and pronounce on objects of sense by our 
bodily organs." " By the discernment peculiar to rational beings we per- 
ceive all primary truths, in the same manner as we perceive objects of 
sense by our bodily organs." " Primary truths of religion and morality 
are as much objects of common sense as other primary truths." In the 
advertisement to the second volume, he mentions that some think that 
this Appeal ought to have set out with a definition of common sense ; 
and he goes on to show that he does not mean by it common opinion, just 
or unjust. He calls it the simple authority of reason, or that capacity of 
pronouncing on obvious truth. " Reason requires our admitting primary 
truths on its authority, under the penalty of being convicted of folly and 
nonsense, if we do not." Oswald cannot be represented as grappling with 
the deeper problems of metaphysics, as, for example, with the question, 
whether the common sense is subjective or objective, or whether it is sub- 
jective in one sense, as it is in the mind, and objective in another sense, 
as the mind in many cases — not all, however — looks to external objects. 
He seems to me to be right when he combines two elements in moral 
apprehension: "we have a feeling, as well as perception, of moral ex- 
cellence." Dr. Oswald was born in Dunnet, became minister there (1727), 
and at Methven (1750), and died in 1793. 



XXIX. — JAMES BEATTIE} 

James Beattie was born Oct. 25, 1735, at the north-east end 
of Lawrencekirk, a village in the heart of the Hozve of the 
Meams in Kincardineshire, where his father kept a retail shop, 
and rented a small farm in the neighborhood. He was educated, 

1 "An Account of the Life and Writings of Dr. Beattie," by Sir William 
Forbes. 



Art. xxix.] HIS YOUTHFUL DAYS. 23 1 

as so many eminent Scotchmen have been, at his parish school, 
and showed an early taste for reading, especially books of poe- 
try. In 1749, he entered Marischal College, Aberdeen, where 
he competed for and received a bursary ; and there his classical 
tastes were at once discovered by Dr. Blackwell, and there in 
coming years he studied philosophy under Dr. Gerard. In 
1753, he was appointed schoolmaster of the parish of Fordoun 
about six miles from his native place, in a hollow at the base of 
the Grampians. He had all along a taste for the beauties of 
nature ; and his poetical genius was kindled, and may have been 
partly guided into the direction which it took, by the peculiar 
scenery of the country, where a fine rich plain stretches out 
with a low range of hills overlooking the German Ocean on the 
one side, and the lofty Grampians on the other. The tradition 
is, that at this period of his life he would saunter in the fields 
or on the hills the livelong night, watching the aspects of the 
sky and welcoming the approach of day, and that he was spe- 
cially fond of wandering in a deep and finely wooded glen in 
the neighborhood. While at this place he secured friends 
and patrons in the parish minister, in Lord Monboddo and 
Lord Gardenstone. The last named of these having seen some 
pieces of his poetry in manuscript, and being in doubt whether 
they were entirely the composition of so young a man, asked 
him to translate a passage of Lucretius ; whereupon Beattie 
retired into an adjoining wood, and produced a translation in a 
very short time. While a schoolmaster at Fordoun, he seems 
to have attended divinity lectures during several winters at 
Aberdeen, with a view to the gospel ministry ; but he soon 
relinquished the pursuit. In 1757, he stood a competitive 
examination for the office of usher in the grammar-school of 
Aberdeen, and was defeated ; but so satisfied were the judges 
of his qualifications that, on the office falling vacant the follow- 
ing year, he was appointed to it without any farther examina- 
tion. In this more public position, his literary abilities became 
known ; and, through the influential friends whom he had 
acquired, he was installed professor of moral philosophy and 
logic in Marischal College in 1760. About this time he 
became a member of the Aberdeen Club, and associated with 
such men as Reid, Campbell, John Gregory, and Gerard. 

As professor, he lectured and examined two or three hours 



232 JAMES BEATTIE. [Art. xxix. 

every day, from November to April, on pneumatology, embrac- 
ing psychology and natural theology ; on speculative and prac- 
tical ethics, economics, jurisprudence, politics, rhetoric, and 
logic, with readings in Cicero and others of the ancient 
philosophers. As a moral philosopher, he felt himself called to 
oppose the scepticism of which Hume was the champion. It 
appears from letters of Dr. John Gregory, published in Forbes's 
"Life of Beattie," that atheism and materialism were at that 
time in high fashion, and were spouted by many who used the 
name of Hume, but who had never read his works, and who 
were incapable of understanding them. Reid had for years 
been examining the foundations of philosophy, which Hume 
had been undermining, and published his "Inquiry" in 1764. 
Beattie followed in 1770, with the Essay on "The Nature 
and Immutability of Truth." This work was his principal 
study for four years : he wrote it three times over, and some 
parts of it oftener. It had so rapid a sale that, in 1771, a 
second edition was demanded ; and, shortly after, there were 
proposals to translate it into French, Dutch, and German. 
While engaged in these severer labors, he was all the while 
cherishing, what I suspect was to him the more congenial occu- 
pation, his taste for poetry. So early as 1766, he is laboring 
in the style and stanza of Spencer, at a poem in which he is to 
give an account of the birth, education, and adventures of one of 
the old minstrels. The First Book of the " Minstrel " was pub- 
lished anonymously in 1771, and a new edition of this Book 
and the Second Book, with his name attached, in 1774. 
Beattie, it may be acknowledged, stands higher as a poet 
than a philosopher. Some of his poems are in the first rank 
of their kind. 

The personal incidents in his remaining life worthy of being 
recorded are not numerous. In 1767, he had married Miss 
Mary Dunn, who was inflicted with a tendency to mental dis- 
ease, which broke out first in a distempered mind, and after- 
wards in insanity, which greatly distressed the kind husband, 
and compelled him at last to provide for her living separate 
from him. His quiet life was varied by several visits paid to 
London, where, as he became known by his works, he received 
considerable attention and was introduced to many eminent 
literary men. On two several occasions he had the honor of 



Art. xxix. ] HIS DECLINING YEARS. 233 

an interview with George III., who had a great admiration of 
the character and object of his works, and granted him a pen- 
sion. The famous painter Sir Joshua Reynolds took a fine 
portrait of him, with the " Essay on Truth " under his arm, and 
above him a winged angelic being holding scales in one hand, 
as if weighing truth, and with the other pushing three hideous 
figures, supposed to represent Sophistry, Scepticism, and Folly 
(Reynolds meant two of these to be Voltaire and Hume), 1 who 
are shrinking away from the light of the sun, beaming from 
the breast of the angel. 

His defences of religion were highly esteemed by several of 
the bishops and a number of the clergy of the Church of Eng- 
land, and he was offered a rich living if he would take orders in 
that church. This he declined, not because he disapproved 
of the doctrine or worship of the Episcopal Church, but he was 
apprehensive that by accepting such preferment he " might 
strengthen the hands of the gainsayer and give the world some 
ground to believe that the love of the truth was not quite so 
ardent or so pure as he had pretended." In 1773, Oxford 
University conferred an honorary degree of LL.D. upon him. 
The same year, he was offered the chair of moral philosophy in 
Edinburgh, but declined, as he preferred Aberdeen as his sphere, 
and was indisposed to go to a place where he would be in the 
heart of those he had attacked. His declining days were em- 
bittered by trials, which sank deep into his soul ; such as the 
state of his wife, and the death first of one and then of the other 
of his sons, one of them being a very promising young man, 
called in early life to be his father's assistant in the college. 2 
We discover traces of irritation in his afflictions ; and one could 
have wished to see him sustained not only by what he sin- 
cerely entertained, a belief in providence and in the word of 
God, but in the peculiar doctrines of redemption and grace, 
so specially fitted to give comfort in trouble. He died Oct. 5, 
1802. 

1 This portrait was lately in possession of the Misses Glennie, his grandnieces, 
in Aberdeen. A print of it is to be found in a few copies of Forbes' "Life of 
Beattie." 

2 The father published "Miscellanies," by James Hay Beattie, A.M., in two 
volumes, 1799. There are some verses worth preserving : — 

" And how Milton has glands in his brain 
That secreted the ' Paradise Lost.' " 



234 JAMES BEATT1E. [Art. xxix. 

In person he was of a middle size, with something of a slouch 
in his gait ; and in his latter years he was inclined to corpu- 
lency. He had dark eyes, and a mild and somewhat pensive 
look. There is an account of his life and writings in a work 
by Sir W. Forbes, in three volumes. It contains many of his 
letters, which are full of criticisms of no great profundity, and 
display at once the amiabilities and weaknesses of the author. 

The following are the titles, with the dates, of his works : Poems (1760) ; 
Essay on Truth (1770) ; Minstrel, B. I. (1771) ; B. II. (1774) ; on Poetry 
and Music, on Laughter and Ludicrous Composition, on Classical Learning 
(1776) ; Dissertations on Memory and Imagination, on Dreaming, on the 
Theory of Language, on Fable and Romance, on the Attachments of Kindred, 
on Illustrations of Sublimity (1783) ; Evidences of Christianity (1786) ; 
Elements of Moral Science (1790-93). He has also Scotticisms, and origi- 
nal notes to an edition of Addison's papers. 

His poems will ever hold a place among the classical writ- 
ings of Great Britain. His "Minstrel" and his "Hermit" are 
exquisite poems of their kind : simple, graceful, tender, and 
leaving a peaceful and peace-giving impression on the mind ; 
and therefore not likely to be appreciated by those whose 
tastes were formed by the passionate and startling style of 
poetry introduced in the next age by Byron, who was at school 
in Aberdeen while Beattie was in his declining years. His 
prose works do not exhibit much grasp or depth of thought, 
but are characterized by much ease and elegance. In his 
lectures he dwelt fondly on style (" Elements of Mental Sci- 
ence," part 10), and his remarks are clear and judicious, though 
somewhat tame and commonplace, but not on that account the 
less useful. His criticism of the " Pilgrim's Progress " may be 
compared with that of Macaulay, written in a later age : " It was 
written about a hundred and thirty years ago, while the author, 
who had been a tinker, was in prison in Bedford, where he was 
confined twelve years. Some false notions in theology may be 
found in it ; and the style is vulgar, and savors of the author's 
trade ; but the fable is ingenious and entertaining." He every- 
where holds forth Addison as the model English writer. His 
own style is without the idiom, the playfulness, the corrusca- 
tions, the flexible windings by which the best papers of the 
" Spectator" are characterized. In reading such a work as his 
" Moral Science," we feel as if we were walking along a road 
with pleasant grass and corn fields on either side, but without a 



Art. xxix.] ELEMENTS OF MORAL SCIENCE. 235 

turn in it, and without a rock or stream, without a hill or val- 
ley. His papers on literary subjects are more attractive, as 
allowing free scope for his fine taste. 

In his " Theory of Language " he argues strongly that speech 
is of divine origin. In his " Dissertation on the Imagination," 
which is very pleasantly written, he holds the theory, afterwards 
expanded by Alison, that the feeling of beauty arises from the 
association of ideas. He begins his " Elements of Moral Sci- 
ence " with psychology. He mentions the twofold division of 
the faculties into perception and volition, but says it is not ac- 
curate, and adds affections, approaching thus to the threefold 
division adopted by Kant and Hamilton. He mentions nine 
perceptive faculties : external sensation, consciousness, memory, 
imagination, dreaming, speech, abstraction, reason (judgment 
or understanding), conscience. I rather think he is right in 
giving speech a place among the native faculties, but we won- 
der to find dreaming there. His account of consciousness is 
loose and popular, but he avoids the error of Dugald Stewart 
in making it look merely at qualities, and of Kant in making it 
look merely at phenomena. " Of the things perceived by this 
faculty, the chief is the mind itself," &c. He has often valuable 
remarks on the faculties. Thus, under memory : " What we per- 
ceive by two senses at once has a good chance to be remem- 
bered. Hence, to read aloud slowly and with propriety, when 
one is accustomed to it, contributes greatly to remembrance ; 
and that which we write in a good hand, without contractions, 
with dark-colored ink, exactly pointed and spelled, in straight 
lines, with a moderate space between them, and properly sub- 
divided into paragraphs as the subject may require, is better 
remembered than what we throw together in confusion. For 
by all these circumstances attention is fixed, and the writing, 
being better understood, makes a deeper impression. Those 
things, also, which are related in two or more respects are more 
easily remembered than such as are related in one respect only. 
Hence, by most people verse is more easily remembered than 
prose, because the words are related in measure as well as in 
sense ; and rhyme, than blank verse, because the words are 
related not only in sense and measure, but also by similar 
sounds at the end of the lines." Some will think that the stu- 
dents who listened to such prelections ranging over all the fac- 



236 JAMES BEATTIE. [Art. xxix. 

ulties, and touching on a great variety of topics, esthetical and 
moral, might be as much benefited as those who had to listen 
to the more scholastic discussions of the German universities. 
He says that " laughter is occasioned by an incongruity or 
unsuitableness of the parts that compose, or seem to compose, 
any complex idea or object." 

The philosophical work by which Beattie was best known in 
his own day, and by which he is still known by students, is his 
" Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, in Opposition 
to Sophistry and Scepticism." He quotes approvingly Reid's 
" Inquiry," and Campbell's " Philosophy of Rhetoric." In an 
edition published in 1776 he replies to some who had blamed 
him for borrowing some hints without acknowledgment from 
Dr. Price, Dr. Oswald, and Buffier. " I beg to say that I am to 
this hour totally unacquainted with that work of Dr. Price 
which is alluded to, and that when I published the first edition 
of the ' Essay on Truth ' I was totally unacquainted with the 
writings of Buffier and Dr. Oswald. I had heard, indeed, that 
the French philosopher used the term 'common sense' in 
a way similar to that in which I use it ; but this was only hear- 
say, and I have since found that, though between his funda- 
mental opinions and mine there is a striking resemblance, his 
application of that term is not entirely the same." All I have 
to remark on this statement is, that if he had not read those 
well-known works on the subject of which he was treating he 
ought to have done so. 

The work is pleasantly and pointedly written, and it had 
an immediate and wide circulation. It wants the depth and 
shrewdness of Reid's "Inquiry," but on that account was better 
relished by many readers, such as George III. The book is, 
throughout, a popular, rather than a scientific one. His some- 
what ad captandum appeals gained the ear of those who had 
never been troubled with doubts, but rather turned away those 
who wished to find the great sceptic met by an opponent 
worthy of him. 

His object is, first, to trace the several kinds of evidence up to 
their first principles ; second, to show that his sentiments are 
in accordance with true philosophy and the principles of the 
most eminent philosphers ; and, third, to answer sceptical ob- 
jections. He says it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to give a 



Art. xxix.] HIS ULTIMATE PRINCIPLE. 237 

definition of truth ; but endeavors to give such a description of 
it as may make others understand what we mean by the word. 
He then tells us that he accounts " that to be truth which the 
constitution of human nature determines a man to believe, and 
that to be falsehood which the constitution of human nature 
determines man to disbelieve." This makes the ultimate ap- 
peal to lie to man's constitution ; and does not meet those who 
say that man's constitution may be an accretion of fortuitous 
agencies gathered in the course of ages, and may lead us into 
partial or total falsehood. According to this definition, there 
might be events without a cause in the constellation Orion, or 
at a " reasonable distance beyond," provided the constitution of 
the inhabitants there had been determined by a different ex- 
perience. He then distinguishes between truth perceived in- 
tuitively and truth perceived in consequence of a proof, and 
enters upon a discussion as to the most appropriate terms to 
employ to designate these two kinds of truth. " We might 
call the one ' reason/ and the other ' reasoning ; ' but the sim- 
ilarity of the terms would frequently occasion both obscurity 
and harshness in the sound." Henceforward he seems to use the 
words " reason " and " reasoning " as synonymous, and uses 
" reason " in the sense of " reasoning." He is quite aware of 
the ambiguity in the phrase "common sense;" but he is to 
use it to denote that "faculty by which we perceive self-evident 
truth," and then distinguishes between common sense and rea- 
son. This distinction between common sense and reason is 
no modern discovery, and he proceeds to quote Aristotle's 
account of axioms, principles, and common sentiments. 

He starts the question, " By what criterion shall we know a 
sentiment of nature from a prejudice of education, a dictate of 
common sense from the fallacy of an inveterate opinion ? " It 
is clear that Reid must often have had that question before him, 
but does not give a very articulate reply. Beattie answers it 
clearly, and I believe judiciously. " He takes that for an ulti- 
mate principle which forces our belief by its own intrinsic evi- 
dence, and which cannot by any reasoning be rendered more 
evident." Here the main stress is laid, as I believe it ought, on 
self-evidence, while necessity comes in secondarily ; " it forces 
our belief by its own intrinsic evidence," a better account than 
that given by Leibnitz and Kant, who put necessity in the front. 



238 JAMES BE ATTIE. [Art. xxix. 

He illustrates his views by mathematical evidence and the evi- 
dence of sense ; and shows that they agree, in both having the 
sanction of common sense. He argues that analogy and testi- 
mony are principles of common sense ; but he is in evident 
difficulties when he is obliged to admit that both of these may 
deceive. He draws a distinction between two kinds of truths, 
'each intuitively certain. " It is a character of some that their 
contraries are inconceivable ; such are the axioms of geometry. 
But of many other intuitive truths the contraries are jfiton- 
ceivable. ' I do feel a hard body,' - 1 do not feel a hard body ; ' 
these propositions are equally conceivable." If we would de- 
fend fundamental truth effectively, we must draw such dis- 
tinctions ; but the main point here is to determine what we 
are led intuitively to believe in the different cases. He shows 
convincingly, in opposition to Locke, that self-evidence is not 
confined to propositions. 

He sustains these principles pretty satisfactorily ; but when 
he proceeds to apply them in a criticism of Berkeley and 
Hume, is not eminently successful. He understands Berkeley, 
as he has been vulgarly understood, as denying the existence 
of matter ; whereas Berkeley is continually asserting that he 
believes firmly in the existence of matter; only he regards 
it as having no existence, except as an idea, in a contempla- 
tive mind, — whereas our intuitive convictions represent it as 
having a reality, so far, independent of the mind contemplat- 
ing it. The consequence is, that Beattie's objections are 
felt by us as missing the point ; as when he argues that, if 
Berkeley's doctrine be true, we should not run out of the way 
of threatened danger. He delights to point out some petty 
incongruities in Hume ; but we see at once that he is not able 
to meet him face to face, and to wrestle with him. He ac- 
knowledges the superior abilities of Hume ; but thinks the 
sceptics unworthy of any kind of reserve or deference, and 
maintains that their reasonings were not only false but ridic- 
ulous, and that their talents as philosophers and logicians were 
absolutely contemptible. 



Art. xxx.] GEORGE CAMPBELL. 239 



XXX. — GEORGE CAMPBELL} 

We are still in an age in which young men belonging to 
county families devoted themselves to the work of the ministry 
of the gospel. George Campbell was the son of the Rev. John 
Campbell, a minister in Aberdeen, and one of the Campbells of 
Westhall, who claimed to be cadets of the house of Argyll. He 
was educated at the grammar-school, Aberdeen, and at Mar- 
ischal College ; and, being destined by his family to the law, he 
was apprenticed to a writer to the signet in Edinburgh. But 
he had a strong disposition towards the church, and he attended 
divinity lectures first in Edinburgh, and then in Marischal and 
in King's, Aberdeen. He was licensed to preach the gospel in 
1746, and was settled as minister of Banchory-Ternan on the 
banks of the Dee in 1748. He was translated to a church in 
Aberdeen in 1757, and there (in 1758) became a member of the 
famous Philosophical Society, and contributed papers which 
were afterwards elaborated into volumes. In 1759, he was 
made principal of Marischal College, and every one felt that he 
was worthy of the office and fitted for it. In 1 771, he was ap- 
pointed professor of divinity in the same college, as successor 
to Gerard. In his opening lecture he says : " It is supposed 
that I am to teach you every thing connected with the study 
of divinity." " I am to teach you nothing ; but, by the grace 
of God, I will assist you to teach yourselves every thing." He 
now resigned his city charge ; but, as minister of Grayfriars, 
an office conjoined with the professorship, he preached every 
Sunday in one of the churches. 

It is a curious coincidence that as Reid succeeded the Rev. 
John Bissett in Old Machar, so Campbell succeeded him in 
Aberdeen : the earnest evangelical giving way in both cases 
to the cultured moderate. From his entrance into Aberdeen 
he was much admired by the educated and refined. The story 
is that some one told Gerard that he must now look to his 
laurels, whereupon the old professor replied that the incomer 
was indolent, a remark which was reported to Campbell, who 

1 Life, by Rev. Dr. Keith. MS. Papers in possession of Andrew Farquharson 
of Whitehouse, kindly lent me. 



240 GEORGE CAMPBELL. [Art. xxx. 

profited by it, and became remarkable for his diligence. It is 
certain that in his later years he showed amazing industry in 
his literary pursuits. From time to time he gave to the press 
sermons characteristic of the age : calm, dignified, elegant, and 
moral, full of reverence, and carefully free from all extrava- 
gance and fanaticism. One feels as if he should have been a 
bishop delivering charges to his clergy, fitted to sustain the 
dignity of the Church of England. His speaking is thus 
described : " The closeness, the force, the condensed precision 
of his reasoning exceed the power of description. Not a single 
superfluous word was used, no weak or doubtful argument 
introduced.'* 

But he gave to the world more elaborate works. Hume's 
influence was now beginning to be felt, and in 1763, Campbell 
publicly entered the lists against him, in " A Dissertation on 
Miracles." Before publishing the work, he transmitted through 
Dr. Blair a copy to Hume, who writes him in his usual pleasant 
manner, not entering into controversy, but stating how his own 
argument had occurred to him when a Jesuit was plying him 
with some " nonsensical miracle." In answering the sceptic, 
Campbell proposes to prove that testimony hath a natural and 
original influence on belief antecedent to experience. He may 
be right in saying that there is such a tendency, — I believe it to 
be hereditary in children ; but this can serve him very little in 
his argument, as it is not of the nature of a necessary principle, 
and he is obliged to admit that testimony often deceives, so 
that we are brought back, as Hume maintains, to experience. 
But he is more successful when he shows that experience can 
prove a miracle, and this notwithstanding that nature is uniform. 
" For this purpose I make the following supposition. I have 
lived for some years near a ferry. It consists with my knowl- 
edge that the passage-boat has a thousand times crossed the 
river, and as many times returned safe. An unknown man, 
whom I have just now met, tells me in a serious manner that it 
is lost, and affirms that he himself saw the passengers carried 
down the stream and the boat overwhelmed. No person who is 
influenced in his judgment of things, not by philosophical sub- 
tleties, but by common sense, a much surer guide, will hesitate 
to declare that in such a testimony I have probable evidence of 
the fact asserted." The last work published by him was " The 



Art. xxx.] HIS PHILOSOPHY OF RHETORIC. 241 

Four Gospels, translated from the Greek, with Preliminary Dis- 
sertations, and Notes Critical and Explanatory," 1789. The 
translation, though elegant, is not idiomatic ; but the disserta- 
tions show a fine critical spirit. After his death, his " Lectures 
on Ecclesiastical History," his " Lectures on Systematic The- 
ology and Pulpit Eloquence," and his " Lectures on the Pastoral 
Character," were published. But in this work we have to look 
merely at the philosophical discussions in his work on the 
" Philosophy of Rhetoric," which was commenced at Banchory, 
and published in 1776. 

We have seen all throughout this history that the Scottish 
metaphysicians following Shaftesbury were fond of speculating 
about beauty and taste, and that all the Scottish thinkers at 
this time were anxious to acquire an elegant style. Adam 
Smith for several years read lectures with great eclat on rheto- 
ric and belles-lettres in Edinburgh, under the patronage of 
Lord Kames, and afterwards did the same in the class of logic 
in Glasgow University. Lord Kames himself discussed like sub- 
jects in his " Elements of Criticism." The elegant preacher Dr. 
Hugh Blair lectured on the subject in the university of Edin- 
burgh, and his " Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-lettres " is 
one of the most useful books ever published on the art of com- 
position. These works were used for several ages, not only in 
Scotland, but even in England, and helped to make rhetoric a 
leading branch of study in all the American colleges. Among 
all the works, Campbell's " Philosophy of Rhetoric " is perhaps 
the most philosophical, or is, at least, the one in which there is 
the most frequent discussion of philosophic problems. 1 

He opens : " In speaking, there is always some end in view, 
or some effect which the speaker intends to produce on the 
hearer." The word eloquence, in its greatest latitude, denotes 
that art or talent by which the discourse is adapted to its end. 
In speaking of oratory suited to light and trivial matters, he 
endeavors to define wit. " It is the design of wit to excite in 

1 This may be the most appropriate place for referring to Ogilvie's " Philo- 
sophical and Critical Observations on the Nature, Character, and Various Species 
of Composition," 1774. The author was born 1737, became minister of Midmar 
in Aberdeenshire, and died in 1814. He was a miscellaneous writer in poetry 
and prose. In " The Theology of Plato compared with the Principles of Orien- 
tal and Grecian Philosophy," he treats of topics not usually discussed by the 
Scottish metaphysicians. 

16 



242 GEORGE CAMPBELL. [Art. xxx. 

the mind an agreeable surprise, and that arising not from any 
thing marvellous in the subject, but solely from the imagery 
she employs, or the strange assemblage of related ideas pre- 
sented to the mind." This end is effected in one or other of 
these three ways, — first, in debasing things pompous or seem- 
ingly grave ; " " secondly, in aggrandizing things, little and 
frivolous ; thirdly, in setting ordinary objects by means not only 
remote, but apparently contrary, in a particular and uncommon 
point of view." 

He enlarges, as most of the Scottish metaphysicians have 
done, on the different kinds of evidence. He begins with 
intuitive evidence, which, he says, is of different sorts. " One is 
that which results purely from intellection. Of this kind is the 
evidence of these propositions : ' One and four make five ; ' ' things 
equal to the same thing are equal to one another ; ' ' the whole is 
greater than a part ; ' and, in brief, all in arithmetic and geometry. 
These are in effect but so many different expositions of our 
own general notions taken in different views." " But when 
the thing, though in effect coinciding, is considered under a 
different aspect, — when what is single in the subject is divided 
in the predicate, and conversely, or when what is a whole in the 
one is regarded as a part of something in the other, — such pro- 
positions lead to the discovery of innumerable and apparently 
remote relations." Under this head he also places, secondly, 
consciousness, " whence every man derives the perfect assur- 
ance which he hath of his own existence." He mentions, thirdly, 
common sense, giving to Burlier the credit of first noticing this 
principle as one of the genuine springs of our knowledge, 
whereas Shaftesbury had previously given it a special and im- 
portant place. That he has not a definite idea of what com- 
mon sense is as a philosophic principle, is evident from his 
stating that "in different persons it prevails in different degrees 
of strength," thus confounding the common principles of intel- 
ligence in all men with the sound sense possessed only by cer- 
tain persons. He mentions a number of such principles, such 
as " whatever has a beginning has a cause ;" " when there is 
in the effect a manifest adjustment of the several parts to a 
certain end, there is intelligence ; " " the course of nature will 
be the same to-morrow that it is to-day." He tries to draw 
distinctions between different kinds of intuitive truth. Thus, 



Art. xxx.] DIFFERENT KINDS OF EVIDENCE. 243 

in regard to primary truths of the third class, " it may be urged 
that it cannot be affirmed of them all at least, as it may be of 
the axioms in mathematics, or the assurances we have from 
consciousness, that the denial of them implies a contradiction." 
It is necessary, I believe, to draw some such distinctions as 
these between the various kinds of first truths ; some of them 
seem to me to be of the nature of primitive cognitions, others 
of primitive judgments. But it is doubtful whether Campbell 
has been able to enunciate the nature of the difference. That 
he has no clear ideas of the relation of our primary perceptions 
to realities is evident from his statement. " All the axioms in 
mathematics are but the enunciations of certain properties in 
our abstract notions, distinctly perceived by the mind, but have 
no relation to any thing without themselves, and cannot be made 
the foundation of any conclusion concerning actual existence ; " 
as if the demonstrations of Archimedes as to conic sections 
had not been found to apply to the elliptic orbits of the comets 
as discovered by Kepler. 

In speaking of deductive evidence, he distinguishes between 
scientific and moral. 1. "The subject of the one is abstract, in- 
dependent truth, or the unchangeable and necessary relation of 
ideas ; that of the other, the real but often changeable and con- 
tingent connections that subsist among things actually exist- 
ing." 2. Moral evidence admits degrees, demonstration doth not. 

3. In the one there never can be any contrariety of proofs ; 
in the other, there not only may be, but almost always is. 

4. The one is simple, consisting of only one coherent series ; 
whereas moral evidence is generally complicated, being in 
reality a bundle of independent proofs. Under moral reason- 
ing he treats of experience, analogy, testimony, calculation of 
chances, &c. [He discusses the nature and use of the scholas- 
tic art of syllogizing. He has no idea of the syllogism being 
merely an analysis of the process which passes through the 
mind in all ratiocination. His objections have been satisfac- 
torily answered byJWhately. 

He has a very interesting chapter on the cause of that 
pleasure which we receive from objects or representations that 
excite pity and other painful feelings, criticising the explana- 
tions by others, and unfolding one of his own, which is rather 
complicated. We are not concerned to follow him when he en- 



N 



244 GEORGE CAMPBELL. [Art. xxx. 

ters on style and elocution. Speaking of his philosophic ability, 
I am inclined to place him next to Reid in the Aberdeen school. 

When minister at Banchory, he married Miss Farquharson, 
of Whitehouse, of whomj^I can say with truth that I never 
knew a more pious, more humane woman, or a woman of better 
sense. She had an enlargement of sentiment not often to be 
found in man (who have many advantages by education), and 
very unlike the contracted notions of the party among whom 
she had been bred. You will not mistake me, my dear ; it is not 
those of the Church of England I mean, — a society for which 
I have a great respect,- — but our Scotch nonjurors, who, though 
they concur pretty much with the other in the ceremonial part, 
differ widely in the spirit they infuse." This is an extract from 
letters to his niece, Annie Richardson, who had gone to a 
boarding-school at Durham. These letters are preserved in the 
Earcjiiharson manuscripts, and are very kindly. "You may de- 
pend upon it we do not forget our dear little niece who has 
been so long with us, and whom we do and cannot help con- 
sidering as one of ourselves, ■ — as an essential part of our little • 
family." The advices given, though rather commonplace, are 
not on that account the less useful. " Let it be an invariable 
maxim with you, my dear, that no art will continue long to 
have influence but what is founded on truth. Deceit and false- 
hood may sometimes serve a present turn, but never fail 
sooner or later to be detected. An injury is done to the in- 
tegrity of one's own mind by doing what is wrong, though it 
should never be discovered ; the discovery which commonly 
follows injures one's character." His religious counsels are 
characteristic : " In regard to religion, you are now at the time 
of life when it specially claims your attention ; and I shall at 
present only observe to you that you ought to study to be pos- 
sessed of the spirit of it, which consists truly in fearing God 
and working righteousness ; in other words, in loving God and 
your neighbor ; but avoid carefully an excessive attachment to 
any particular form or mode of worship. The two extremes 
to be guarded against are libertinism and bigotry. The former 
consists in the want of a proper sense of religion ; and the 
latter in an inordinate attachment to forms, or to any of the 
distinguishing badges of a particular sect or party." 



Art. xxxi.] JAMES BURNETT (LORD MONBODDO). 245 

In the Farquharson manuscripts there are letters from Dr. 
Douglas, of Windsor, from which we gather some glimpses of 
the times. " It appears that in Oxford and Cambridge the num- 
ber of students [letter dated 1789] had greatly decreased in 
consequence of the little attention which many of the bishops 
of late years had paid to their degrees." He goes on to say : 
" The very great influx of young men from Scotland offering 
themselves as candidates for orders has been generally re- 
marked. This did not use to be the case, and nothing per- 
haps will check it but a strictness which, in particular cases, 
will, I have no doubt, be dispensed with." It appears from 
these letters that he is in London in July, 1787, along with 
Dr. Beattie and his son, and that he is making arrangements 
about the publication of his " Dissertations." He spends a 
week with Dr. Douglas ; and had the honor of a little con- 
versation with his Majesty no less than three different times, 
and once, which is still more, with the Queen. " It is not to be 
questioned, that, after such distinction, I feel myself a much 
greater man than when you knew me at Aberdeen." 

In person he was below the middle size, with a mild and 
delicate expression. In conversation he was pleasant and 
agreeable, though at times falling into fits of absence. He 
resigned his professorship in 1795, and soon after his principal- 
ship. He died April 1, 1796. 



XXXI. — JAMES BURNETT {LORD MONBODDO). 

He was descended from an ancient family in Kincardineshire, 
and was born in October, 17 14, at Monboddo, which is beauti- 
fully situated on the southern slope of the Grampians, and com- 
mands a view of the Howe of tJie Mearns, lying below it. He 
received the rudiments of his education at the parish school 
of Laurencekirk, which lies a few miles off, and studied the 
usual branches at King's College, Aberdeen, where he showed 
a taste for Greek literature, and graduated there in 1729. It 
was still the habit of Scottish youths who wished to have a 
high education to resort to Holland, and he went to Groningen, 
where he continued three years studying civil law, and where, 



246 JAMES BURNETT (LORD MONBODDO). [Art. xxxi. 

it is reported, in the society of some English gentlemen and 
French refugees, he contrived to get rid of his Scotch pronun- 
ciation, and to acquire an accurate knowledge of the French 
tongue. In 1738, he was admitted to the Scotch bar, where 
he rose to eminence by his learning and his shrewdness, and 
particularly distinguished himself in the famous Douglas case, 
and helped to gain the title and estates for his client. In 1767, 
he was raised to the bench by the title of Lord Monboddo. 
As a judge, he was painstaking and upright ; his decisions 
were sound, and supported by great erudition and acuteness. 
From time to time he rode up to London on horseback, and 
there mingled in the best literary circles, with such men as Mur- 
doch, Armstrong, James Thomson, and Mallet, Markham, the 
Archbishop of York, Earl Stanhope, the first and second Earls 
of Mansfield, Lords Thurlow and Grantley, Bishops Horsley, 
Lowth, Porteous, Shipley, and Burgess, Sir John Pringle, Lewis, 
Scot, Seward, and Harris the author of " Hermes." While 
there, he showed himself at the levee and drawing-room at 
St. James, where the King took special notice of him. 

He married a very lovely woman, Grace Farquharson, who 
died early, having had three children, a son and two daughters ; 
the son and one of the daughters were cut off, to the great dis- 
tress of the father. The poet Burns, who received much atten- 
tion from the judge, addressed a poem to that daughter, and 
says of her : " There has not been any thing nearly like her, in 
all the combinations of beauty, grace, and goodness the great 
Creator has formed, since Milton's Eve, on the first day of her 
existence." In the midst of his legal studies and his domestic 
afflictions he ever turned eagerly to metaphysical pursuits. In 
1773, he published his elaborate work, "On the Origin and 
Progress of Language," and at various times from 1779 to 
1799 his still larger work on " Ancient Metaphysics." At his 
country seat, he acted the farmer, lived on terms of pleasant 
familiarity with the people on his estate, was generously hos- 
pitable, and zealously promoted agriculture in his neighbor- 
hood. At this place he received Samuel Johnson on his 
Scottish tour. In Boswell's account of the intercourse of the 
two, Lord Monboddo appears in by no means a disadvanta- 
geous light. He died at his house in Edinburgh, May 26, 
1799. 



Art. xxxi.] HIS ECCENTRICITIES. 247 

The eccentricities of his opinions and his conduct never 
interfered with his practical sagacity, or lowered him in the 
esteem and affection of the community. " His unbounded ad- 
miration of the customs, the literature, and the philosophy of 
the ancients strongly prepossessed him in favor of whatever 
was connected with such studies. In them, he supposed that 
he beheld all that was praiseworthy and excellent, while he 
looked on the moderns as a degenerate race, exhibiting only 
effeminacy and corruption. This attachment to ancient man- 
ners led him to imitate them, even in his amusements and 
habits of life. He was fond of athletic exercises in his youth, 
particularly fencing and fox-hunting, which tended to strengthen 
a constitution naturally healthy and robust. His general hour 
of rising in all seasons was six in the morning ; and till a late 
period of his life he used the cold bath in the open air, even 
in the middle of winter. He took a light, early dinner, and 
a plentiful supper. The ancient practice of anointing, even, 
was not forgotten, though the lotion he used was not the oil 
of the ancients, but a saponaceous liquid composed of rose- 
water, olive oil, saline aromatic spirit, and Venice soap, which, 
when well mixed, resembled cream. This he applied at bed- 
time, before a large fire, after coming from a warm bath. His 
method of travelling was also in conformity to his partiality 
for ancient customs. A carriage, which was not in common 
use among the ancients, he considered as an engine of effemi- 
nacy and sloth ; and to be dragged at the tail of a horse, 
instead of mounting upon his back, appeared to him to be a 
truly ludicrous degradation of the genuine dignity of human 
nature." 1 In Karnes's Life it is said his " temper was affection- 
ate, friendly, social. He was fond of convivial intercourse, and 
it was his daily custom to unbend himself amidst a select party 
of literary friends, whom he invited to an early supper. The 
entertainment itself partook of the costume of the ancients ; it 
had all the variety and abundance of a principal meal ; and the 
master of the feast crowned his wine, like Anacreon, with a 
garland of roses. His conversation, too, had a race and flavor 
peculiarly its own. It was nervous, sententious, and tinctured 
with genuine wit. His apothegms, or, as his favorite Greeks 
would rather term them, yvmfjuu, were singularly terse and for- 

1 Article, James Burnett, in the "Edinburgh Encyclopedia." 



248 JAMES BURNETT (LORD MONBODDO). [Art. xxxi. 

cible, and the grave manner in which he often conveyed the 
keenest irony, and the eloquence with which he supported his 
paradoxical theories, afforded the highest amusements of those 
truly Attic banquets which will be long remembered by all who 
had the pleasure of partaking in them." 

I confess that I have felt a deep interest in reading the phil- 
osophical works of Lord Monboddo, — he is so unlike any other 
Scotch metaphysician, he is so unlike his age. As appearing 
among a body of inductive inquirers, and in the middle of the 
eighteenth century, he looks very much like a megatherium 
coming in upon us in the historical period. His society is not 
with the modern empiricists, not even with the Latins, but 
with Plato and the Neo-Platonists, with Aristotle and his com- 
mentators. As regards the higher Greek philosophy, he is the 
most erudite scholar that Scotland has produced, not except- 
ing even Sir William Hamilton. His favorite author among 
the moderns is Cudworth, whom he characterizes as "more 
learned in the whole ancient philosophy, the older as well as 
the later, than any modern author I know." He speaks of 
Locke's Essay as " no other than a hasty collection of crude, 
undigested thoughts, by a man who thought and reasoned by 
himself upon subjects of the greatest difficulty and deepest 
speculation, without assistance of learning." He refers to 
Andrew Baxter, and charges the Newtonion astronomy with 
making the system of the heavens a mere machine ; it sup- 
poses the universe had a beginning in time, contrary to all the 
ancients, who held that it " was an eternal emanation of an 
eternal being." It is mind that moves the celestial bodies, — 
mind moving simply and uniformly. He refers to Berkeley, 
and also to Hume, lately deceased, and says of the latter, that 
his chief argument arises from "confounding sensations and 
ideas." He refers also to Reid's " Inquiry," and I suppose that 
the rising Scottish school was before him when he speaks of 
it as an unsatisfactory philosophy, which would maintain that 
" the perception of every sensible object is necessarily accom- 
panied with a belief of its existence ; that is the constitution 
of our nature, and that we are to inquire no more about it." 
He holds it " to be impossible that intellect can believe any 
thing without a reason." He maintains that we do not form 



Art. xxxi.] LETTER TO MR. HARRIS. 249 

ideas by nature. "We mistake habits of judging acquired by 
experience for the natural perceptions of sense." He thinks 
that by the eye we perceive objects first as double and in- 
verted. His postulatum is that " the evidence of conscious- 
ness is infallible." " By consciousness, we know that we have 
perceptions of sense." " In the perceptions of sense, every 
man is conscious that he is passive, and that he is moved or 
excited to sensation by some thing." Of all his contemporaries, 
he is most thoroughly in sympathy with Mr. Harris, the author 
of " Hermes," with whom he corresponded. 

We may here give an extract-letter from Lord Monboddo 
to Mr. Harris, in return for presentation copy of " Hermes." 

"Edinburgh, Wednesday, 26 March, 1766. — As your works first intro- 
duced me to the Greek Philosophy, so this present you have now made me 
has revived my taste for that study, which, though never quite extinguished, 
had been lost for some time amid the hurry of law business. I fell on 
greedily, as soon as the book was sent me, and began with the most philo- 
sophical part of your ' Hermes,' viz., the chapter upon General Ideas, which 
you have explained most truly and philosophically, according to the dic- 
tates of that school to which, I confess, I have entirely addicted myself, — I 
mean the school of Aristotle, for as to Plato, he speaks of them in such 
mysterious and enigmatical terms, as if they had been a secret known only 
to himself; and I remember he makes Hippias the Sophist, when he was 
asked what the to nakov was, answer, 'it was a fine virgin.' If philosophy was 
in such a state in the days of Plato, as not to understand perfectly what is 
the foundation of all science and knowledge among men, how much is it in- 
debted to that wonderful man, Aristotle, who, besides his discoveries in 
every branch of philosophy, has cleared the principles of it from that 
obscurity which the enthusiasm and mystic genius of Plato had thrown 
upon them ? 

" I think I may, without the least suspicion of flattery, give to you the 
praise which Cicero takes to himself, of teaching philosophy to speak a new 
language; for as he taught it to speak Latin, so you have taught it to speak 
English. The language which Mr. Locke has put into her mouth is mere 
stammering, and is, in my opinion, as contemptible as the matter which he 
has made her utter. Mr. Hobbes I am not so well acquainted with ; but as 
he is of the same heresy, that is, one of those who pretend to philosophize, 
without the assistance of the ancients, I suppose he has succeeded as ill. 
As for myself, I am meditating great things in the literary way, but I am 
not sure that I will ever execute any thing. I have one work in view, which 
I think would not make a bad second part, if it were executed, to your 
' Hermes,' — I mean a work showing the origin and progress of this most 
wonderful of all the arts of man, the art of speech. What set me upon this 
train of thinking was the study of some most barbarous and imperfect lan- 
guages, spoken in America, from grammars and dictionaries which I had 



250 JAMES BURNETT (LORD M0NB0DD0). [Art. xxxi. 

out of the King's Library, when I was last at Paris. Besides the curiosity 
of seeing the process of so wonderful an art, in tracing the progress of 
language, you at the same time trace the progress of the human under- 
standing, and I think I have already collected materials from which a very 
good history of the human mind might be formed, — better, at least, than that 
which Mr. Locke has given us. This, if I had leisure, I would make part 
of a much greater work which I project, viz., a History of Man ; in which I 
would propose to trace him through the several stages of his existence ; 
for there is a progression of our species from a state little better than 
mere brutality to that most perfect state you describe in ancient Greece, 
which is really amazing, and peculiar to our species. But the business 
of a laborious profession will, I'm afraid, prevent me from executing this, 
and several other projects which I have had in my head. But with re- 
spect to you, being now eased of the care of public affairs, the world will 
certainly exact from you an account of your leisure ; especially as you have 
given them such pledges of your capacity to instruct and entertain them. 
You have done enough upon grammar. But I would have you do some- 
thing upon logic, to show an ignorant age that the greatest discovery in 
science ever made by any one man is the discovery of the syllogism by 
Aristotle." » 

He has two great philosophic works. The first is "Ancient 
Metaphysics, or the Science of Universals ; with an Appendix 
containing an Examination of the Principles of Sir Isaac New- 
ton's Philosophy." It is in six quarto volumes, averaging four 
hundred pages each. He treats first of metaphysics and then 
of man. The proper subject of metaphysics is "mind pure 
and separate from all matter." In nature, all is either body or 
mind or their accidents. There is not in the universe, so far 
as our knowledge extends, any body without mind ; they are 
never separated in the material world. " What is moved I call 
body, what moves is called mind." " Under mind in this defi- 
nition I include, ist, the rational and intellectual ; 2d, the ani- 
mal life ; 3d, the principle in the vegetable by which it is 
nourished, grows, and produces its like, and which, therefore, is 
commonly called the vegetable life ; and 4th, the motive prin- 
ciple, which I understand to be in all bodies, even such as are 
thought to be inanimate." He says the Greek word tyvxy 
denotes the three first kinds ; the fourth, the motive, is not com- 
monly in Greek called yvxy, but Aristotle says it is maneg tyvir\ m 
He makes moving or producing motion an essential property of 
mind. In respect of quality, motion applies to mind as well as 

1 This letter is in possession of the family at Monboddo. 



Art. xxxi.] ON MIND. 25 1 

body. By motion the whole business of nature above, below, 
and round about us is carried on. " It is impossible that any 
thing can be generated, come to maturity, or be extinguished 
without passing from one state to another. Now that passage 
is motion." He proves the immateriality of mind in general, 
(1) from the nature of motion, (2) from the nature of body, (3) 
from the nature of mind. He establishes the two first a priori, 
and the third by a demonstration ex absurdo. He has then a 
posteriori proof. " Sensation cannot be produced by a material 
cause ; reasoning and consciousness far less." 

Coming to minds, he adopts the Aristotelean distinction 
between the gnostic and orective powers. The gnostic powers 
are sense, phantasy, and comparison. In sense, the mind is not 
conversant with the visible object itself, but with the image or 
Eidwlov, as the Epicureans called it, thrown off from the object. 
The essential distinction between sense and phantasia is, that 
what we perceive by the sense is present and operating upon 
the sense, whereas the object of the imagination is not present. 
Phantasy is only of sensible objects. Memory is only of ideas, 
and belongs exclusively to man. " Brutes have no idea of time, 
or of first and last. Phantasy serves to them the purpose of 
memory." The object is painted on the brute's phantasia, but 
without any perception of the time when he first saw it. Sense 
and phantasy perceive particular things, — comparison, generals 
or ideas. He thinks that brutes possess the comparative fac- 
ulty, and that here the mind of the brute acts without the 
assistance of the body. As to will, he reckons " all will as free, 
and, at the same time, it is necessary ; but of a necessity very 
different from material or physical." Much of this psychology 
is avowedly taken from Aristotle, but at the same time exhibits 
traces of shrewdness and independence, and, it has to be added, 
of eccentricity. 

He criticises Locke's theory of the origin of ideas. He 
acknowledges no innate ideas, if we mean ideas present to the 
mind, and contemplated before they are excited by objects ; but 
they are there though " latent and unproductive," and are 
there even before our existence in this world. Nature, however, 
" has so ordained it, that they can only be excited by the impulse 
of objects upon our organs of sense." It should be noticed 
here, that notwithstanding the prominence given to it by 



252 JAMES BURNETT (LORD MONBODDO). [Art. xxxi, 

Locke, Lord Monboddo has no recognition of reflection or 
consciousness as a separate source of ideas. 

He dwells with evident fondness on categories or universal 
forms. All things are to be known by their causes. The 
knowledge of first causes belongs to metaphysics. Every 
thing that is to be known falls under one or other of the cate- 
gories. He shows that God must have ideas. Man is capable 
of forming ideas. Time is not a cause, but is a necessary 
adjunct or concomitant of the material world. If nothing 
existed, it is evident there could be no such thing as time. 
His definition of time does not make the subject much clearer, 
as it introduces the phrase duration, which needs explanation 
quite as much as time does : " it is the measure of the dura- 
tion of things that exist in succession by the motion of the 
celestial bodies. Beings which suffer no change, neither in 
substance, qualities, nor energies, cannot be in time. Of this 
kind we conceive Divinity to be, and therefore he is not in time 
but in eternity." As to space, it is nothing actually, but it 
is something potentially ; for it has the capacity of receiving 
body, " for which it furnishes room or place." Here it should 
be observed that room or place comes in to explain space, 
which is as clear as either room or place, — which are, in, fact 
embraced in it. " Space has not the capacity of becoming any 
thing, but only of receiving any thing." 

He represents Aristotle as saying that the beauty of nature 
consists in final causes, without which we can conceive no 
beauty in any thing. In expounding his own views, he tells us 
that in a single object there may be truth, but no beauty. In 
order to give beauty to truth, there must be " a system, of which 
the mind, perceiving the union, is at the same time struck with 
that most agreeable of all perceptions which we call beauty. 
And the greater the variety there is in this system, the 
greater the number of parts, the more various their connections 
and dependencies upon one another, the greater the beauty, 
provided the mind can distinctly comprehend the several parts 
in one united view." There must be some truth here, though 
it may not be the whole truth. 

In vols. iii. and iv. he treats of man. This is the only part 
of his book fitted to excite an interest in these times. " It is 
surprising," he says, " that so little inquiry has been made con- 



Art. xxxi.] ON MAN. 253 

cerning the natural history of our own species." He then 
proceeds to divulge his own theory, which, in some respects, is 
an anticipation of the Darwinian. He maintains that man was 
at first a mere animal, that he walked on all fours, and that he 
possessed a tail, of which we discover the rudiments. There 
has been a progression in mankind from one stage to a higher ; 
they erect themselves, they learn the use of their hands, and 
they learn to swim. They lived first on natural fruits as they 
presented themselves, and then learned hunting and fishing. 
Men were for a time solitary, and then came to herd together. 
He is not so trustworthy as Darwin in his facts : he tells us 
that there is a whole nation of Esquimaux with only one leg ; 
that the one-eyed cyclops of Homer is not a mere fiction ; that 
in Ethiopia men have only one eye, and this in their foreheads ; 
and he expresses his belief in mermaids. 

But he detects far higher properties than the Darwinians 
have yet done. Man's mind was at first immersed in matter ; 
but, by exerting its native power, it can act without the assist- 
ance of body, and transports itself into that ideal world which 
every man who believes in God must believe to be the arche- 
type of this material world. But he insists that there has been 
a great degeneracy in the race, of which Moses' account of the 
fall of man is an allegorical version. Corruption of manners 
begins in every nation among the better sort, and from them 
descends to the people. He shows that there must be a total 
reformation of manners and morals ; and, in doing so, he speaks 
of the effeminacy which has arisen from the use of clothes. 
But he is ever insisting on the difference between man and 
brute. The actions of man proceed from opinion, but not the 
actions of brutes. In the lower animals there is no considera- 
tion of means and ends. He finds one great difference in the 
circumstance that man is dissatisfied, envies, and repines, which 
the brute creatures never do. 

In volume vi. he treats of the being of God. Nothing can 
exist without a cause. A first cause, therefore, is necessary, 
and he inquires into what must be the nature of the cause of 
the world. The cause must be self-existent, — necessarily ex- 
istent, eternal, and unchangeable Of this nature must be the 
efficient cause of the world. But he agrees with Aristotle that 
there must also have been a natural cause from all eternity. In 



254 JAMES BURNETT (LORD MONBODDO). [Art. xxxi. 

his work on language he represents the theology of Plato 
as more sublime than that of Aristotle. The theology of 
Aristotle, so far as it goes, is a pure system of theism ; but il 
is defective in two great points. First, the providence of God 
over all his works is not asserted ; on the contrary, God is 
represented as passing his whole time in contemplation. Sec- 
ondly, he does not make God the author of the material world, 
but only the mover ; he does not derive from Him even the 
minds that animate this world. 

His work on " The Origin and Progress of Language," in six 
vols. 8vo., is less important. Still, it contains some shrewd re- 
marks. By language he means the expression of the conceptions 
of the mind by articulate sounds. He does not think that lan- 
guage is natural to man. Men came to invent articulate sounds 
by the imitation of other animals. A political state was neces- 
sary for the invention of language. He had evidently some 
acquaintance with the affinities of the Teutonic, Persian, Greek, 
and Latin. He represents the Hebrew, Phoenician, Syriac, and 
Chaldaic, as having also an affinity. He believes that there may 
also be an affinity between the two groups. 

He corrects a very common misapprehension of his day as 
to abstract and general ideas. In his work on metaphysics : 
"Abstract ideas are different from general, though they be con- 
founded by our modern philosophers ; an idea must be first 
abstracted from the particular object from which it exists be- 
fore it can be generalized." In his work on language, he 
shows that we may have a conception of a particular quality 
of any substance abstracted from its other qualities without 
averring such quality to belong to any other substance. " In 
order to form the general idea, a separation or discrimination is 
necessary of these qualities one from another ; and this kind 
of abstraction I hold to be the first act of human intellect, and 
it is here the road parts betwixt us and the brute ; for the 
brute perceives the thing and perceives the perception in his 
memory just as the object is presented by nature — that is, 
with all its several sensible qualities united ; whereas the 
human intellect separates and discriminates and considers by 
itself the color, e.g., without the figure, and the size without 
either." 



Art. xxxii.] ADAM FERGUSON. 255 



XXXII. — ADAM FERGUSON} 

He was the son of Rev. Adam Ferguson, minister of the 
parish of Logrerait, Perthshire, and was born June 20, 1723. 
The Scottish ministers often belonged to good families in 
these times, and Carlyle describes Ferguson as the son of a 
Highland clergyman with good connections and a Highland 
pride and spirit. He received his early education partly from 
his father, partly at the parish school. We are ever discover- 
ing traces of the influence of the parish schools of Scotland 
in producing its great men. He afterwards went to the gram- 
mar school of Perth, where he excelled in classics and the 
composition of essays, which has always had a high place in 
Scotland, fostered by the very circumstance that boys had to 
unlearn the Scottish and learn the English tongue. Thence 
he resorted to the University of St. Andrews, where he gradu- 
ated May 4, 1742, with a high reputation in classics, mathe- 
matics, and metaphysics. He now entered on the study of 
theology, first at St. Andrews, and then in Edinburgh, where 
he fell into the circle of Robertson, Blair, Wedderburn, and 
Carlyle, and joined them in forming a debating society. Before 
finishing his theological course, he was appointed deputy-chap- 
lain of the Highland forty-second regiment, and was present 
at the battle of Fontenoy, where he went into action at the 
head of the attacking column with a drawn sword in his hand. 
His military career helped him afterwards to give accurate 
descriptions of battles in his " Roman History," and furnished 
him opportunities for studying human nature and politics. He 
never had any predilection for the clerical profession, and aban- 
doned it altogether on the death of his father. After spending 
some time in Holland, as so many Scottish youths had done 
in the previous century, he returned to his old associates in 
Edinburgh, where he was appointed, in 1757, David Hume's 
successor as librarian and clerk in the Advocate's Library. 
He there became a member of the " Select Society " instituted 

1 Biographical Sketch of Adam Ferguson, LL.D., F.R.S.E., Professor of 
Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, by John Small, MA., Librarian 
to the University. Read before the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, April 18, 
1S64. 



256 ADAM FERGUSON. [Art. xxxii. 

in 1754 by Allan Ramsay, and holding its meetings in one of 
the inner apartments of the library, for literary discussion, 
philosophical inquiry, and improvement in public speaking. 
Among its members were Hume, Robertson, Smith, John 
Home, Wilkie, Lord Hailes, Lord Monboddo, Sir John Dal- 
rymple, and the elder Mr. Tytler, the men who constituted the 
bright literary constellation of their age and country. This 
society declined after a time, but was renewed in 1762, under 
the name (at the suggestion of Ferguson) of the " Poker Club." 
Ferguson became involved in the controversy stirred by his 
friend Home writing the play of Douglas, and published " The 
Morality of Stage Plays seriously Considered." He seems to 
have left the office of librarian rather abruptly, being allured by 
an offer to become tutor to the sons of Lord Bute. By the 
influence of his friends he was made professor of natural phil- 
osophy in the University of Edinburgh in 1759, and David 
Hume remarked : " Ferguson had more genius than any of 
them, as he had made himself so much master of a difficult 
science, viz., natural philosophy, which he had never studied 
but when at college, in three months, so as to be able to teach 
it." In 1760, he was elected to an office more congenial to him, 
that of professor of pneumatics and moral philosophy, as succes- 
sor to Mr. Balfour, who took the chair of the law of nature 
and nations. In less than two years he published his " Essay 
on the History of Civil Society," a work on which he had 
been engaged for a considerable time. It was conceived in 
the manner of Montesquieu, but dwelt on elements at work 
in the formation of civil society which the French author had 
overlooked. Part I. treats of the " General Characteristics of 
Human Nature." Works on social economy proceed very much 
on the principle that man is mainly swayed by a desire to pro- 
mote his own interests, and they furnish no analysis of the 
other interests which men look to. They do not consider that 
man has social and conscientious feelings, by which many are in- 
fluenced quite as much as by self-love ; and that he is as often 
swayed by caprice, vanity, and passion, as by a cold-hearted 
selfishness. Ferguson perceived this. Mankind, we are told, 
are devoted to interest, and this ^n all commercial nations is 
undoubtedly true. But it does not follow that they are by 
their natural dispositions averse to society and mutual affec- 



Art. xxxii.] ESSAY ON CIVIL SOCIETY. 2$? 

tion. Speaking of those who deny moral sentiment, he says 
that they are fond of detecting the fraud by which moral re- 
straints have been imposed ; "as if to censure a fraud were not 
already to take a part on the side of morality." " The for- 
eigner who believed that Othello on the stage was enraged for 
the loss of his handkerchief was not more mistaken than the 
reasoner who imputes any of the more vehement passions of 
men to the impressions of mere profit or loss." So, after dis- 
cussing the question of the state of nature, he treats of the 
principles of self-preservation, of union among mankind, of 
war and dissension, of intellectual powers, of moral sentiment, 
of happiness, of national felicity. In unfolding these, he insists 
that mankind should be studied in groups or in society. He 
then traces these principles in the history of rude nations, of 
policy and arts, the advancement of civil and commercial arts, 
the decline of nations, corruption of political slavery. The 
tone of the work is healthy and liberal, but is filled with com- 
mon-place thought and observation. I find a sixth edition 
published in 1793. After this it was not much heard of. The 
French Revolution gave men more earnest questions to think 
of. But these disquisitions, and still more effectively the pub- 
lication of the "Wealth of Nations," in 1776, kindled a taste 
for social inquiries in the University of Edinburgh and in the 
capital of Scotland. 

The smallness of his salary, only ^iooa year, tempted him 
to undertake the charge of the education of Charles, Earl of 
Chesterfield, nephew to the earl who wrote on manners, and 
he had the benefit of a continental tour with his pupil. He 
waited upon Voltaire at Ferney, where, he tells us, " I en- 
couraged every attempt at conversation, even jokes against 
Moses, Adam, and Eve, and the rest of the prophets, till I 
began to be considered as a person who, though true to my 
own faith, had no ill-humor to the freedom of fancy in others." 
His description is graphic : " I found the old man in a state of 
perfect indifference to all authors except two sorts, — one, those 
who wrote panegyrics, and those who wrote invectives on him- 
self. There is a third kind, whose names he has been used to 
repeat fifty or sixty years without knowing any thing of them, 
— such as Locke, Boyle, Newton, &c. I forget his compet- 
itors for fame, of whom he is always either silent or speaks 



258 ADAM FERGUSON. [Art. xxxii. 

slightingly. The fact is, that he reads little or none ; his mind 
exists by reminiscence, and by doing over and over what it has 
been used to do, — dictates tales, dissertations, and tragedies, 
even the latter with all his elegance, though not with all his 
former force. His conversation is among the pleasantest I 
ever met with. He lets you forget the superiority which the 
public opinion gives him, which is indeed greater than we con- 
ceive in this island." In consequence of his absence, the town 
council tried to turn Ferguson out of his office in Edinburgh, 
but he resisted at law, and returned to his duties in 1775. 

He had evidently a strong inclination to active life, which 
might bring him into new scenes and situations favorable to 
the study of character. So in 1778 he was appointed secre- 
tary to the commissioners appointed to discuss and settle the 
points in dispute between Great Britain and her American 
colonies. In New York the commissioners received a commu- 
nication from Congress intimating that the only ground upon 
which they could enter on a treaty would be an acknowledg- 
ment of the independence of the States and the withdrawal of 
the British force from America. So he returns the following 
year to his professorial duties, which it is interesting to notice 
were performed during his absence by his pupil, Dugald Stew- 
art. During these years he became involved in the controversy 
about the authenticity of the " Poems of Ossian," taking, as 
might be expected of a Highlander, the side of Mr. McPherson. 
He also took an active part in the formation of the Royal So- 
ciety of Edinburgh, which originated very much with Principal 
Robertson, and was incorporated in 1783. He had long been 
engaged on the work by which he was best known in his own 
day, " The History of the Progress and Termination of the 
Roman Republic." Avoiding the early and disputed period of 
Roman history, and leaving the later period to Gibbon, he gives 
a clear and judicious account of the time which elapsed be- 
tween 240 a. u. c. and the death of Tiberius. I am not sure 
that we have a better account of the republic, published prior 
to the investigations started by Niebuhr. 

In 1766, he had published a short syllabus of his lectures, en- 
titled " Analysis of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy, for the 
use of Students in the College of Edinburgh." Using this as 
a text-book, he lectured to his class without writing out what 



Art. xxxii ] MORAL AND POLITICAL SCIENCE. 259 

he said. He claims, however, that he bestowed his utmost dili- 
gence in studying the subject, including the order in which it 
was to be treated, and in preparing himself for every successive 
step he was to make in his course, but to have no more in 
writing than the heads or short notes froui which he was to 
speak, preparing himself, however, very diligently for every par- 
ticular day's work. When his health gave way, in 1781, he 
wrote out his course, and during his retirement corrected it for 
the press and published it in 1792 : "Principles of Moral and Po- 
litical Science ; being chiefly a retrospect of Lectures delivered 
in the College of Edinburgh." He confesses that he is partial 
to the Stoic philosophy, and acknowledges his obligations to 
Shaftesbury, Montesquieu, Harris, and Hutcheson. The work 
is divided into two parts, — the first relating to the fact of 
man's progressive nature ; the second, to the principles of right, 
or the foundations of judgment and choice. The sources of 
knowledge are consciousness, perception, testimony, and infer- 
ence. Consciousness is the first and most essential attribute 
of the mind. To other animals, appetite continues to be the 
sole motive to action ; and the animal in every moment of time 
proceeds on the motive then present. But to man, the repeated 
experience of gratification and crosses, like the detail of partic- 
ulars in any other, is matter of generalization ; he collects 
from thence the predicaments of good and evil, and is affected 
towards any particular object according as he has referred it 
to the one or the other. In unfolding his views, he has im- 
portant remarks on the purposes served by abstraction. " The 
abstract form of an operation is a physical law, and its applica- 
tion the constituent of physical science. The abstract form 
and expression of what is excellent or good is a moral law and 
principle of moral science." But " to whatever object we in- 
cline, or however we may have classed individual things in our 
conception of what is good or evil, it is proper to remember in 
this place that every effort of the mind is also individual and 
particular, relating to an object in some particular and individual 
situation." There is a hint here of a distinction between gov- 
erning principles in their individual exercise and in their ab- 
stract form fashioned by the logical understanding, which 
might have cleared up a vast amount of confused discussion, 
had he carried it out. He adds : " The more general character 



260 ADAM FERGUSON. [Art. xxxii. 

of man's inclinations or active dispositions is not a blind pro- 
pensity to the use of means, but instinctive intimation of an 
end for the attainment of which he is left to discover and to 
choose by his own observations and experience the means 
which may prove most effectual." He starts questions which 
had been discussed by Aristotle, but which had been lost sight 
of by modern moralists, as to the ends by which man is swayed, 
and the importance in ethics of considering means and end, 
and for this gets an occasional commendation from Sir W. Ham- 
ilton. Believing in the progression of man, he would set before 
him no meaner end than the attainment of perfection, and 
places in this the principle of moral approbation, and for this 
he receives the commendation of M. Cousin. " We find in 
his method the wisdom and circumspection of the Scottish 
school, with something more masculine and decisive in its re- 
sults. The principle of perfection is a new one, at once more 
rational and comprehensive than benevolence and sympathy, 
and which, in our view, places Ferguson as a moralist above 
all his predecessors." He thinks that he embraces all moral 
systems in his own, admitting, with Hobbes and Hume, the 
power of self-interest or utility, Hutcheson's benevolence and 
Smith's sympathy, — all helping progression, and tending towards 
perfection. All this sounds very lofty, and contains important 
truth, as we should all aim at our own perfection and that of 
the race, but leaves the question unsettled, what is this per- 
fection to be, — a perfection in felicity, as the final end, or a 
perfection in moral good : and what is the nature and criterion 
of moral good ? 

Ferguson's style and manner are not so subdued as those of 
the Scottish metaphysicians who preceded him. He has more 
of a leaping mode of composition, as if he had an audience 
before him, and is at times eloquent or magniloquent. I have 
an idea that, as Dugald Stewart drew his philosophy mainly from 
Reid, so he got his taste for social studies from Ferguson, who 
may also have helped to give him a livelier style, — the aca- 
demic dignity, however, being entirely Stewart's own. 

In 1785, he resigned his professorial labors. He passed the 
remainder of his life in retirement, residing in various places, 
and living till 22d June, 18 16. The following pen-and-ink 
sketch of the old man by Lord Cockburn, in the " Memorials 



Art. xxxiii.] JAMES HUTTON. 26 1 

of his Time," brings him vividly before us : " His hair was 
silky and white ; his eyes animated and light-blue ; his cheeks 
sprinkled with broken red, like autumnal apples, but fresh and 
healthy ; his lips thin, and the under one curled. A severe 
paralytic attack had reduced his animal vitality, though it left 
no external appearance, and he required considerable artificial 
heat. His raiment, therefore, consisted of half-boots, lined 
with fur ; cloth breeches ; a long cloth waistcoat, with capacious 
pockets ; a single-breasted coat ; a cloth greatcoat, also lined 
with fur; and a felt hat, commonly tied by a ribbon below the 
chin. His boots were black, but, with this exception, the whole 
coverings, including the hat, were of a quaker-gray color, or of 
a whitish-brown ; and he generally wore the furred greatcoat 
even within doors. When he walked forth, he used a tall staff, 
which he commonly held at arm's-length out towards the right 
side ; and his two coats, each buttoned by only the upper 
button, flowed open below, and exposed the whole of his curious 
and venerable figure. His gait and air were noble ; his ges- 
ture slow ; his look full of dignity and composed fire. He 
looked like a philosopher from Lapland." I never heard of 
his dining out except at his relation, Joseph Black's, where his 
son, Sir Adam (the friend of Scott), used to say " it was de- 
lightful to see the two rioting over a boiled turnip. Domesti- 
cally, he was kind, but anxious and peppery." 4 ' He always 
locked the door of his study when he left it, and took the key 
in his pocket ; and no housemaid got in till the accumulation 
of dust and rubbish made it impossible to put the evil day off 
any longer, and then woe on the family." 



XXXIII. — JAMES HUTTON. 

He was the son of a merchant in Edinburgh, was born June 3, 1726, 
studied first in his native city, then in Leyden, where he took the degree of 
M.D., and devoted his life to agricultural pursuits and scientific investiga- 
tions in chemistry, mineralogy, and specially in geology. He died March 
26, 1797. He is best known as the author of a " Theory of the Earth," 
which was expounded in a clear and elegant manner by Playfair. He 
accounts for the present condition of the earth by the operation of a central 
heat ; and there was long a contest between his theory and that of Werner, 



262 JAMES BUTTON. [Art. xxxiii. 

who explains the formation of strata by water ; geologists now find place 
for both agencies. It is not so generally known that he found much satis- 
faction in the pursuit of metaphysics, and is author of an elaborate work in 
three large quarto volumes, "An Investigation of the Principles of Knowl- 
edge, and of the Progress of Reason from Sense to Science and Philosophy." 
The work is full of awkwardly constructed sentences and of repetitions, and 
it is a weariness in the extreme to read it. Yet we are made to feel at 
times that these thoughts must be profound, if only we could understand 
them. He certainly speculates on recondite subjects, but does not throw 
much light on them. Knowledge is " considered as consisting first of external 
information ; secondly, of internal conception. In the first, mind is made 
to know no passion ; in the second, it is made to know no action." " Knowl- 
edge is no more the attribute of mind than mind is that of knowledge. We 
suppose that there is a substance called mind, and we then attribute 
knowledge to this substance ; but knowledge is the very thing which in 
this case subsists. Space and time are conceptions of the mind, founded 
upon activity and inactivity ; that is to say, upon the volition of the mind, 
whereby either on the one hand action is produced that is change, or on 
the other hand inaction is ordained wherein the powers of the mind are 
preserved in a state of attention to the idea then in view." In his view of 
matter, he expounds a dynamical theory which becomes an ideal theory, 
closely approaching that of Berkeley. "There is no inert matter subsist- 
ing with magnitude and figure ; but the external thing exists with moving 
and resisting powers." "Real solidity or impenetrability is truly a con- 
ception of our intellect, like that of equal lines and angles, but it is a suppo- 
sition which nothing in nature authorizes us to make." "We deceive 
ourselves when we imagine that there is a subsisting independent of our 
thought, — an external thing, which is actually extended and necessarily 
figured." " Figure is a thing formed in the mind albne, or produced by 
the proper action of our thinking substance." He says it is wrong to sup- 
pose that magnitude and figure subsist without our mind. He tells us 
that his theory agrees with that of Berkeley in this, that " figure and magni- 
tude are not real and absolute qualities in external things ; " but he holds 
that " there is truly an external existence as the cause of our knowledge," 
whereas Berkeley holds that there is no such external existence. We 
have here a view of matter very different from that of the Scottish school, 
who have commonly been inclined to the doctrine of Descartes. Metaphys- 
ical science will now have to set itself to determine what substantial 
truth there is in idealism, and, with the light of modern inquiries as to 
atoms, what truth there is in the dynamical theory of matter. 



Art. xxxiv.] JOHN GREGORY. 263 



XXXlV. — yOJIJV GREGORY} 

The Gregorys are about as illustrious a family as Scotland has produced. 
Chalmers, in his "Biographical Dictionary," reckons no fewer than sixteen 
who have held British professorships. The founder of the family was 
James Gregory, the inventor of the reflecting telescope which bears his 
name. He became professor of mathematics in St. Andrew's, where he 
died in 1675, at the early age of thirty-six. He had a son James, who 
became professor of medicine in King's College, Aberdeen, and founded 
the school of medicine there. John, who merits a passing notice in our 
pages, was the son of this gentleman. He was born at Aberdeen in 1724, 
was educated there, occupied successively the chairs of philosophy and 
medicine, and, along with Reid, instituted the famous literary society. To 
this society he read essays, which were methodized and published in 1764, 
under the title, "Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man 
with those of the Animal World." He considers the condition of man in 
a state of society under three different aspects ; (1) in a savage state, where 
he is distinguished by his corporeal powers ; (2) when the social affections 
and the heroic virtues appear ; (3) where men have the means of acquiring 
wealth, and seek refinement and luxury. In treating of these topics he 
offers many thoughtful reflections. He remarks that men of refined genius 
must live in a manner abstracted from the world, that hence they are liable 
to cherish envy and jealousy ; so there is perhaps less real friendship among 
authors than among the rest of mankind. , " Certain it is, virtue, genius, 
beauty, wealth, power, and every natural advantage one can be possessed 
of, are usually mixed with some alloy, while disappointing the fond hopes of 
their raising the possessor to any uncommon degree of eminence, and even 
in some measure bring him down to the common level of his species." He 
dwells fondly on taste, and remarks, " wherever what is denominated a very 
correct taste is generally prevalent, genius and invention soon languish." 
In treating of religion, he exhibits the rising spirit of his age. " The arti- 
cles of religious belief falling within the comprehension of mankind are few 
and simple, but have been erected by ingenious men into monstrous sys- 
tems of metaphysical subtlety." " Speculative and controversial theology 
injure both the temper and affections." In the same year he removed to 
the wider field offered in Edinburgh, and became one of the ornaments of 
the brilliant literary circle there. Two years after he was appointed pro- 
fessor of the practice of medicine in the university, and was a very popular 
teacher. He published a number of medical works, and left behind him 
when he died in 1773 a work composed after he lost his wife, "A Father's 
Legacy to his Daughter." It is characterized by calm wisdom, often some- 
what worldly, and for long had a large circulation. " Be ever cautious in 

1 Life, by Lord Woodhouselee, prefixed to his " Works " in four volumes ; 
" Literary and Characteristical Lives," by William Smellie. 



264 JAMES GREGORY. [Art. xxxv. 

displaying your good sense. It will be thought you assume a superiority 
over the rest of the company. But if you happen to have any learning, keep 
it a profound secret, especially from the men, who generally look with a 
jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts and a cultivated under- 
standing." 



XXXV. — JAMES GREGORY. 

James Gregory, the third of this name, was the son and the successor in 
the chair of medicine in Edinburgh of John Gregory. He was born in 
Aberdeen in 1753, and died in 1821. For many years he stood at the head 
of his profession as a physician in Edinburgh. He published a number of 
medical works. His " Conspectus Medicinae Theoretical," written in good 
Latin, was long used as one of the works on which- the candidates for medi- 
cal degrees were examined. He comes before us as author of " Philosoph- 
ical and Literary Essays," dated Jan. 1st, 1790, and published 1792. He 
dedicates the work to Reid, and acknowledges that he had taken a principal 
argument from one of Reid's observations in the essays on the " Intel- 
lectual Powers of Man." The most important essay is " On the difference 
between the Relation of Motive and Action and that of Cause in Physics, 
on Physical and Mathematical Principles." In an introduction in which he 
is long in coming to the point, he dwells on the looseness and ambiguity of 
the word " cause," and remarks that if " there should be occasion to attend 
to the more minute or specific differences among the several things com- 
prehended under the genus 'cause,' it would be highly expedient or rather 
absolutely necessary to give to each of them a specific name, were it only an 
addition to the generic name cause." He has a glimpse of there being 
more than one agent involved in cause. " No substance is of itself a 
physical cause ; this depends on its relation to some other substance, and 
implies the tendency to change in the latter." " The substance in which 
the change is observed is considered as the subject, the other as the cause ; 
and as change occurs generally in both or all of the substances so related, 
though it be not always of the same kind in them all, it depends on the 
circumstance of our attention being directed first and chiefly to one or other 
of them, and on our opportunities of observing the changes that occur in 
them, which of them we shall regard as the subject and which as the cause, 
as in the example of the communication and the loss of motion, of mutual 
gravitation, of the solution of salt and saturation of water, the melting of ice, 
or the boiling of water and the absorption of heat." This is a vague antici- 
pation of the doctrine started in our day as to their being two or more 
agents in all material causation, — a doctrine, I may add, not yet followed out 
to its consequences in regard to mechanical, chemical, and physiological 
action. He insists that there is in mind a certain independent self-govern- 
ing power which there is not in body ; in consequence of which there is a 
great difference between the relation of motive and action and that of cause 



Art. xxxvi.] ALEXANDER CROMBIE. 265 

and effect in physics ; and by means of which a person in all cases may at 
his own discretion act, either according to or in opposition to any motive 
or combination of motives applied to him ; while body in all cases irresisti- 
bly undergoes the change corresponding to the cause or combination of 
causes applied to it. " I propose to demonstrate the falsity and absurdity 
of the doctrine of necessity on mathematical principles, in mathematical 
form, partly by means of algebraic formulas, partly with the help of dia- 
grams," and he uses mathematical formulae and others invented by himself. 
He endeavors to show by an indirect demonstration that the doctrine of 
necessity must be false, as it leads to false conclusions. He takes the case 
of a porter carrying a burden : " If a guinea should be offered for carrying it 
in the direction of A B, and half a guinea for carrying it in the direction A C, 
and let him be assured that if he can earn the guinea he cannot earn the 
half guinea, and that if he earn the half guinea he cannot earn the guinea ; 
will he go in the direction of A B or A C, or remain at rest in A ? " He 
answers, that if the principle on which the necessity is founded be true, he 
must move in the diagonal A D. " But as it must be acknowledged that 
the porter will not move in that direction, experience proving the fact, then 
it follows that the law of physical causes and that of motives do not coin- 
cide, and that the relation between motives and actions is not necessary as 
between physical causes and their effects." Dr. Crombie attacked Dr. Greg- 
ory's reasoning, Sir W. Hamilton says "with much acrimony and con- 
siderable acutenass." There subsequently appeared letters from Dr. 
James Gregory, of Edinburgh, in defence of his essay on the " Difference of 
the Relation between Motive and Action and that of Cause and Effect in 
Physics'; with Replies by the Rev. Alexander Crombie, LL.D." London : 
18 19. " It is much to be regretted that Dr. Gregory did not find leisure to 
complete his answer to Messrs Crombie, Priestley, and Co., of which five 
hundred and twelve pages have been printed, but are still unpublished." 
(Coll. Works of Reid, by Hamilton, p. 87.) We are reminded that the 
clearest defence by Reid of the doctrine of the freedom of the will is con- 
tained in letters to Dr. Gregory, and published in Hamilton's edition of his 
works. At a time when the Calvinistic faith of Scotland might have led 
theologians into perilous necessarian doctrines, it was of great moment to 
have the essential liberty of will (which Calvin never denied) defended by 
such philosophers as Reid and Gregory. 



XXXVI.— ALEXANDER CROMBIE. 

He was born in Aberdeen in 1760, and lived till 1842. He became a Pres- 
byterian minister in London, and a schoolmaster at Highgate and after- 
wards at Greenwich. He wrote a number of educational works of value, as 
" Etymology and Syntax of the English Language," and " Gymnasium sive 
Symbola Critica." He has two philosophical works, — one on " Philosophi- 
cal Necessity," dated Newington Green, 1793, and another on "Natural 
Theology," in 1829. In the preface to the first of these works, he tells us 



266 ARCHIBALD ARTHUR. [Art. xxxvii. 

that he was initiated in the principles of moral science by Dr. Beattie ; that 
when he was a student in divinity the question was debated in a theological 
society, " Is man a free or necessary agent ? " that he was then attached to 
the libertarian system, and continued to be so till he read Priestley's " Illus- 
trations ; " and that he was confirmed in the change of view by Hartley's 
" Observations." He answers Gregory's argument and illustration quoted 
above : " This demonstration of the essayist's is founded in error. It pro- 
ceeds on the supposition that the two motives are not directly but indirectly 
repugnant, which is obviously false ; any reconciliation between them being 
absolutely impossible." " If a guinea is offered to carry a letter ten miles 
east, and another to carry a letter ten miles south ; and if I know I cannot 
earn both ; if I know also that by taking any intermediate road I shall 
receive nothing, — then my situation is precisely the same as if the direc- 
tions, instead of being eastward and southward, had been to points diamet- 
rically opposite." He admits " that a necessarian, consistently with his 
principles, cannot feel that remorse which is founded on the conviction that 
he has acted immorally, and might have acted otherwise ; but by the law of 
his nature he feels pain from that state of mind which is connected with a 
vicious conduct." " A necessarian should feel no remorse, no painful senti- 
ment for any past action, as he knows it was necessary for general hap- 
piness." The opponents of necessity argue that these are the logical 
consequences of the system, in order to land it in a reductio ad absurdum : 
but scarcely any of the defenders have allowed this. It is evident that the 
necessity he expounds is very different from that of Edwards. His work 
on " Natural Theology " is a clear and judicious one. He argues that no 
metaphysical argument such as Clarke's, and no metaphysical principle 
such as Reid's common sense, can of itself prove the existence of God. 
The question is : " Are or are there not conclusive proofs in the phenomena 
of nature that they must be productions of an intelligent author ? " 
" Wherever we find order and regularity obtaining, either uniformly or 
in a vast majority of instances, where the possibilities of disorder are indefi- 
nitely numerous, we are justified in inferring from this an intelligent cause." 
He argues against materialism, and in favor of the immateriality of the 
souL 



XXXVII. —ARCHIBALD ARTHUR. 

He was born at Abbot's Inch in the parish of Renfrew in 1774, and died in 
1797. He became assistant and successor to Dr. Reid, in the chair of 
moral philosophy, in Glasgow. There is a posthumous volume by him, 
entitled " Discourses on Theological and Literary Subjects," 1803, edited 
by Professor Richardson, and containing an account of his life. His views 
do not seem profound or original, but his style is elegant, and he has some 
good remarks on cause and effect, and on beauty. 



Art. xxxix.] REVIEW OF THE CENTURY. 267 



XXXVIII. — JOHN BR UCE. 



He was born in 1744, and died in 1826. He published a little book for the 
use of his students, — " First Principles of Philosophy, by John Bruce, A.M., 
Professor of Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh." It reached a sec- 
ond edition in 1781. It consists of mere notes or heads. Logic has a wide 
enough field : — it is " the comprehensive science which explains the method 
of discovering and applying the laws of nature." He makes the sources of 
human knowledge to be sensation, understanding, and consciousness. He 
has another work, " Elements of the Science of Ethics, on the Principles of 
Natural Philosophy." He defines the moral faculty as " the power of per- 
ceiving the objects which regard the happiness or enjoyments of human 
nature." If we ask in what the physical law of gravitation consists, the 
answer is, in the uniformity of the effect in material nature. If we ask in 
what the moral law consists, the answer is, in the uniformity of the effect 
" that the observation of rights is the source of enjoyment. 1 ' Mr. Bruce 
does not sound the depths of any subject of which he treats. 



XXXIX. — RE VIE W OF THE CENTUR Y. 

By the close of the century, the fathers and elder sons of the 
family have passed away from the scene ; and we may be prof- 
ited by taking a glance at the work they have done. The 
Scottish metaphysicians have had an influence on their coun- 
try, partly by their writings, but still more by the instruction 
which they imparted in the colleges to numerous pupils, after- 
wards filling important offices in various walks of life, and 
scattered all over the land. I cannot do better here than quote 
from the chapter in which M. Cousin closes his criticism of 
Reid. " By his excellencies as well as his defects, Reid repre- 
sents Scotland in philosophy." " It would be impossible to 
write a history of Scotland in the last half of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, without meeting everywhere in the numerous and remark- 
able productions of the Scotch genius of this epoch, the noble 
spirit which that genius has excited, and which, in its turn, 
has communicated to it a new force. In face of the authority 



268 REVIEW OF THE CENTURY. [Art. xxxix. 

of Hume, and despite the attacks of Priestley, the philosophy of 
common sense spread itself rapidly, from Aberdeen to Glasgow, 
and from Glasgow to Edinburgh ; it penetrates into the univer- 
sities, among the clergy, into the bar, among men of letters 
and men of the world ; and, without producing a movement so 
vast as that of the German philosophy, it exercised an influ- 
ence of the same kind within narrower limits." We have the 
testimony of a succession of eminent men, to the effect that 
the chairs of mental philosophy, taken along with the essay- 
writing which the professors holding these chairs demanded, 
exercised a greater influence than any others in the colleges ; 
and sent forth a body of youths capable of thinking, and of 
expressing their thoughts in a clear and orderly manner. 
From an old date, a reverence for the Roman law ; and, at a 
later date, the judicial training of many youths in Holland — ■ 
had given a logical form to the pleadings at the Scottish bar, 
and the decisions of the bench : and now the philosophy wid- 
ened the comprehension of the Edinburgh lawyers, and gave 
to their law papers a philosophical order scarcely to be found 
in those of England or Ireland. 1 The Scottish philosophy 
never attempted, as the German philosophy did (greatly to the 
injury of religion), to absorb theology into itself ; but keeping 
to its own field, that of inductive psychology, it allowed the 
students to foliow their own convictions, evangelical or ration- 
alistic, but training all to a habit of skilful arrangement and 
exposition. It enabled and it led the theological professors 
to dwell on the relation between the truths of God's Word, 
and the fundamental principles of human nature ; to lay a 

1 Not a few of the Edinburgh lawyers wrote philosophical treatises. Thus, 
" Essays, Moral and Divine," by Sir William Anstruther, of Anstruther, one of 
the Senators of the College of Justice, 1701. He treats of atheism, providence, 
learning and religion, trifling studies, stage-plays and romances, incarnation, Jesus 
Christ, and redemption of mankind. He opposes Locke with some ability, and 
shows that the idea of a Perfect Being is simple and innate, imprinted on our 
minds by God in our creation. Then in Sir George Mackenzie's (the bloody 
Mackenzie) "Works," two vols, folio, 17 16, we have an essay on happiness. 
He shows that nothing without us, not even philosophy, can make us happy, 
that religion alone can do so. He treats of atheism, of moral gallantry, of the 
moral history of frugality. He begins with an address to fanatics. He would 
act the religious stoic, and holds that solitude is to be preferred to public em- 
ployment. We have also, "Some Thoughts concerning Religion, Natural and 
Revealed, with Reflections on the Sources of Incredulity with regard to Relig- 
ion," by Rt. Hon. Duncan Forbes, of Culloden, 1750. 



Art. xxxix.] EDINBURGH LITERARY CIRCLE. 269 

deep and solid foundation for moral principle, to impart a moral 
tone to their teaching in divinity, and to expound, clearly and 
wisely, the arguments for the existence of God and the immor- 
tality of the soul. In the pulpit, it produced a thoughtful style 
of address, of which English and Irish hearers were wont to 
complain, as requiring from them too great a strain of thought. 
It fostered a habit of reasoning and discussion among edu- 
cated men generally ; and, through the ministers of religion 
and the parochial teachers, — not a few of whom were college 
bred, — it descended to the common people as a general intel- 
ligence and independence of spirit. 

On literature the influence of the Scottish has not been so 
great as that of the German philosophy ; but still it has been 
considerable, and altogether beneficent. All the professors 
paid great attention to style : they weeded out their Scotticisms 
with excessive care ; not a few of them were teachers of rhet- 
oric ; they exacted essays on the subjects lectured on, and sent 
forth a body of pupils capable of writing clearly and easily. 
Every one who has read their writings notices a style common 
to the whole Aberdeen school : it consists of simple sentences 
without strength or genuine idiom, but always limpid, calm, 
and graceful. It is worthy of being mentioned that, in the last 
quarter of the century, Edinburgh had a distinguished literary 
circle: embracing the historian Robertson ; the preacher Blair; 
Mackenzie, the author of " The Man of Feeling ; " such scien- 
tific men as Hutton, Black, Playfair, the Monros (father and 
son), and Cullen with the Gregories ; and among them the meta- 
physicians, Hume, Smith, Ferguson, Monboddo, and Dugald 
Stewart, held a prominent place. 

It has to be allowed that the original genius of Scotland was 
not called forth by the Scottish philosophy, nor, it may be 
added, by the Scottish colleges. The truth is, it is not the 
province of colleges, or of education even, to produce origi- 
nality : their function is to guide and refine it. Robert Burns 
owed little to school training, and nothing to college learning ; 
still such a man, with so much profound sense mingling with 
lust and passion, could have appeared only in a state of society 
in which there was a large amount of intelligence. His father 
was a thoughtful man, with a considerable amount of reading, and 



270 REVIEW OF THE CENTURY. [Art. xxxix. 

the mother's memory was filled with Scottish songs. After min- 
gling in the literary circle of Edinburgh, he testifies that he had 
found as much intelligence and wit among the jolly bachelors 
of Tarbolton, as among the polished men of the capital. 1 It is to 
the credit of the Scottish metaphysicians, — such as Lord Mon- 
boddo, Ferguson, and Stewart, — that they paid the most delicate 
attention to the young poet when he came to Edinburgh in 
1786. He strove to understand the Scottish metaphysics with 



1 Having, in my boyish days, often "kissed the cup to pass it by," among 
those who had drunk and been drunk with Burns, I am prepared to believe this : 
but I have to add, that though the sense and humor were strong and shrewd they 
were often coarse and sensual. Burns was reared in an age in which the uncom- 
promising religion of the covenant was giving way, in the south-west of Scotland, 
to the milder religion or irreligion of the moderate type. He owed much to the 
sincere devoutness of his father ; but, in spite of all that the literary admirers of 
Burns may say to the contrary, I am not sure that it was for the benefit of the 
son that the father, brought up in the more latitudinarian east coast of Scotland, 
attached himself to the New-Light party, as the youth was thereby thrown among 
those who had no depth of piety, and who rather rejoiced in the ebullitions 
against religion which he uttered in moments of passion, which he never meant 
to publish, and over which he lamented in his declining life. Burns ever held 
firmly by the great truths of natural religion, and had a profound reverence for 
the Bible, to which he turned fondly in his latter days : he seems often, always in 
times of impulse, to have prayed, and would rise from his prayers to write to 
Clarinda: "I have just been before the throne of my God, Clarinda ; according 
to my association of ideas [observe the Scotch metaphysics], my sentiments of 
love and friendship, I next devote myself to you." He declared, in the presence 
of the elegant Dr. Blair, that his favorite preacher in Edinburgh was the evan- 
gelical Dr. Walker. Burns lived in the age in which, contemporaneous with the 
declining p ; ety, the two great vices of Scotland, intemperance and illicit inter- 
course of young men and women, descended to the common people. The evan- 
gelical ministers had not the courage to check in the bud the rising intemperance, 
and, in the second age of moderatism, many of the moderate clergy became the 
victims of it. The dwellings of the Scottish peasantry were wretched ; and court- 
ship among the young people was concealed as if it were a crime, and driven out 
of the house into places of darkness, the summons to which is indicated in the 
line, " Whistle, and I'll come to you, my lad." The consequence was, coarse 
tastes among the small farmers' and cotters' daughters and servant girls, which 
neither the evangelicals nor the moral philosophers or clergy bred by them 
sought to refine. Cromek, speaking of Burns's visit to Edinburgh, says : "But a 
refined and accomplished woman was a thing almost new to him, and of which 
he had formed but a very inadequate idea." The evil was not lessened, but 
rather fomented, by the coarse mode of public ecclesiastical discipline which 
greatly chafed Burns when applied to him. I am convinced that the conduct and 
poetry of Burns helped greatly to foster the national vices. I speak what I 
know, as my boyish days were spent in the land of Burns, and I met with old 
men who knew Burns and the state of society in which he lived. 



Art. xxxix.] BURNS AND SCOTT. 2J\ 

only imperfect success. 1 Alison's " Essay on Taste " made known 
to him the theory which refers beauty to association of ideas, 
and Burns yields his theoretical assent, while evidently doubting 
inwardly. He writes : " That the martial clangor of a trumpet 
had something in it vastly more grand, heroic, and sublime, 
than the twingle-twangle of a jew's-harp ; that the delicate text- 
ure of a rose-twig, when the half-blown flower is heavy with 
the tears of dawn, was infinitely more beautiful and elegant 
than the upright stalk of the burdock, and that from something 
innate, and independent of all association of ideas, — these I 
had set down as irrefragable orthodox truths until perusing 
your book shook my faith." It is an interesting circumstance 
that young Walter Scott met with Burns in Edinburgh, in the 
house of Adam Ferguson, and was struck with his dark, ex- 
pressive eye, and with his combined humor and pathos. Scott 
did not owe much more than Burns to the Scottish philosophy. 
But he was a pupil of Dugald Stewart's, and may have owed to 
him and his college training, that power of clear exposition 
and order by which his prose works are distinguished above 
those of most men of high imaginative genius. 2 

It may be interesting at this point to look across the chan- 
nel, and inquire what philosophy was doing on the continent. 
I begin with that country which was the ancient ally of Scot- 
land. Both the Scotch and French philosophies professed to 
draw much from Locke ; but they seized on very different ele- 
ments. The Scotch followed him in his cautious spirit and 

1 I've sent you here, by Johnie Simson, 

Twa sage philosophers to glimpse on : — 

Smith wi' his sympathetic feeling, 

And Reid to common sense appealing. 

Philosophers have fought and wrangled, 

And mickle Greek and Latin mangled, 

Till, wi' their logic-jargon tired 

And in the depth of science mired, 

To common sense they now appeal, 

That wives and wabsters see and feel. 
It is curious to find Burns referring to the philosophy of Spinoza. 

2 In Stewart's class he wrote an essay on the " Manners and Customs of the 
Northern Nations," and the professor said, "the author of this paper shows much 
knowledge of his subject, and a great taste for such researches." Scott became, 
before the close of the session, a frequent visitor in Mr. Stewart's family, and an 
affectionate intercourse was maintained between them through their after lives. 
(Lockhart's " Life of Scott.") 



272 REVIEW OF THE CENTURY. [Art. xxxix. 

careful. observation, but withstood from the beginning the rash 
hypothesis which derived all our ideas from sensation and 
reflection ; and they called in, besides the external and internal 
senses, other senses as inlets, and in the end came to look 
upon them as being exercises of reason. 1 The French looked 
exclusively at the other side of Locke's philosophy, at the ex- 
periential side, carrying Locke's theory a stage farther ; they 
left out reflection, made little use of observation, betook 
themselves to analysis, and exerted their ingenuity to derive 
all ideas from sensation. Condillac (born 171 5, died 1786), 
made all man's ideas, even the highest, such as cause and 
moral good, transformed sensations. Most of his works were 
written for the purpose of helping to educate a prince of 
Parma, and the author did not mean to undermine moral- 
ity or religion. But the logical consequences of error follow 
it unrelentingly, and are apt to come out in practical issues 
which the authors of it never contemplated. If Condillac 
did not see, those who came after him clearly perceived that 
we could not, out of the mere materials supplied by the 
senses, extract, by any mental chemistry, the idea of moral 
obligation and of a spiritual God. Helvetius expounded a 
morality of self-interest ; Cabanis evolved all thought out of 
organized matter, made the brain secrete thought as the liver 
secretes bile ; D'Holbach showed that the issue was blank 
atheism ; and licentious men and women were rejoicing in the 
thought that they had got rid of duty, of mind, and of God. 
The fruit of the whole was seen, not in the French Revolution, — 
which was much needed, and would have come, with or without 
the philosophy, — but in the direction which it took, and the 
atrocities which it perpetrated, and which caused it, unlike the 
English and American revolutions, to issue in a military des- 
potism. By the close of the century, this philosophy had gone 
beyond ripeness to rottenness, and finer minds were turning 
away from it, and seeking for something better. The reaction 
started by Laromiguierre, and carried on more effectively by 
Royer Collard, and* yet more so by his pupils Jouffroy and 

1 In "Dissertatio Philosophica Inauguralis de Analogia et Philosophia Prima," 
Feb. 23, 1739, Professor Cleghorn says : "Idea innata nulla est. Aptitudo quoe- 
dam innata menti inest qua ad ideas hasce, vulgo innatas dictas, percipiendas 
approbandasque, quandocumque se obtulerit necessario dirigetur." 



Art. xxxix.] EMMANUEL KANT. 273 

Cousin, turned eagerly, as we shall see, towards the well- 
grounded philosophy of Reid and Stewart. 

In Germany, philosophy took a very different direction. 
Leibnitz had opposed Locke and his experiential method, and 
had imparted a speculative spirit and an ideal elevation to the 
German thinking ; and Wolf had labored to reduce the whole 
to logical forms. And now, as the offspring of the two, of 
idealism and formalism, the true German philosophy came forth 
from the brain of Emmanuel Kant, who was born 1724, died 
1804, and published his great work, the " Kritik der reine Ver- 
nunft " in 1781, which took a considerably revised form in 1787. 
That philosophy was already taking firm hold of the German 
mind, and has not at this day lost its grasp, notwithstanding 
the efforts of Darwinism and materialism to loosen it. As it 
differed from the French, so it also differed from the Scotch. 
In a sense, indeed, Kant's philosophy was transplanted from 
the Scottish soil. Kant's grandfather named Cant, a saddler, 
emigrated from Scotland ; 1 and some think that he thence 
derived hereditarily his high conception of moral law : and he 
acknowledges that he was roused from his dogmatic slumbers 
by Hume's sceptical account of the relation of cause and effect. 
But Reid and Kant, though both opposed to Hume, took up 
very different lines of defence. In respect of method, Reid 
followed the inductive method, with self-consciousness as the 
instrument of observation ; whereas Kant inaugurated the criti- 
cal method, as distinguished from the dogmatic method of 
Descartes on the one hand, and the empirical method of 
Locke on the other. The critical method takes upon itself to 
criticise all principles ; but it can do so only by other principles, — 

1 I have employed more time than I would like to tell any one, in searching after 
the Scottish ancestry of Kant, but without success. I find that the name Cant 
was not uncommon in Forfarshire in last century : it occurs on the tombstones 
in a number of churchyards. In a map of a piece of ground at the north end of 
Brechin, there is mention of its belonging successively to George Cant and Alex- 
ander Cant. There was a James Cant, weaver in Brechin, admitted to the 
guild in 1779. I have seen a deed in which George Scott sells, in 1799, to John 
Cant, tanner in Brechin, a piece of property on the east side of High Street. It 
had been bought in 1796 by the two, in a contract of copartnery for carrying on 
the business of manufacturing and selling of leather. As leather and saddlery 
are connected, I have at times favored the idea that Kant, the saddler, may have 
been descended from the same Cants as John Cant, the tanner, who it is under- 
stood came from Montrose to Brechin. It is proper to state that I have been 
assisted in these researches by D. U. Black, Esq., town clerk, Brechin. 

18 



274 REVIEW OF THE CENTURY. [Art. xxxix. 

avowed, or more frequently unavowed, — and the question is 
started : How are these other principles to be judged ? by other 
principles, and these by other principles without end ? Or, if 
we must stop somewhere, the question is, Where ? and, Why 
there ? Every German metaphysician plants himself on his 
own stand-point, which he says cannot be disputed : but his 
neighbor disputes it or selects another ; and there is a perpet- 
ual criticism, and an endless building, but without an undisputed 
foundation. In one respect, indeed, the two, the Scotch and 
German philosophies, were alike : both stood up for principles 
which did not derive their authority from experience. But the 
Scottish metaphysicians discovered these by a careful inquiry 
into the operations of the human mind ; Kant, by a process of 
logical discussion. On another point they differed : the Scot- 
tish metaphysicians make our primitive perceptions or intu- 
itions look at realities ; whereas Kant stands up for a priori 
principles, which, regulate experience and have only a subject- 
ive validity. Having allowed idealism to enter, there was no 
means of arresting its career. As Kant had made time and space, 
substance and cause, mere forms in the mind, Fichte was only 
advancing a few steps farther on the same road when he made 
the whole universe a projection of the mind ; and, in the suc- 
ceeding age, Schelling made it an intellectual intuition, and 
Hegel a logical process. Even as the French sensationalism 
led to atheism, so the German idealism culminated in panthe- 
ism. Every one will allow that the German philosophy had a 
much more elevated character, and a much more elevating ten- 
dency, than the French. Its influence on the great body of 
the German people may not have been so great as that of the 
Scottish philosophy on the Scottish thought. On the other 
hand, its influence has been vastly greater on literature, to 
which it has imparted a high ideal character, as seen especially 
in the poetry of Germany, and of other countries which have 
borrowed from it. 



Art. xl.] DUGALD STEWART. 27$ 



XL.—DUGALD STEWART} 

Dugald Stewart was born in the old college buildings, Edin- 
burgh, on November 22, 1753. His father was Dr. Matthew 
Stewart, at one time minister at Roseneath, and after- 
wards successor to Maclaurin in the mathematical chair in 
Edinburgh, and still known as one of those British mathe- 
maticians, who were applying, with great skill and beauty, the 
geometrical method, while the continental mathematicians were 
far outstripping them by seizing on the more powerful instru- 
ment of the calculus. His mother was the daughter of an 
Edinburgh writer to the signet. He was thus connected on 
the part of his father (and also of his grandfather, who had been 
minister of Rothesay), with the Presbyterian ministry, and on ' 
the part of his mother with the Edinburgh lawyers, — the two 
classes which, next to the heritors, held the most influential 
position in Scotland. 

Dugald was a feeble and delicate infant. He spent his 
boyish years partly in Edinburgh, and partly in the maternal 
mansion-house of Catrine, which I remember as being, when 
I paid pilgrimage thither many years ago, a whitewashed, 
broad-faced, common-place old house, situated very pleasantly 
in what Wordsworth calls expressively the " holms of bonnie 
Ayr," but unpleasantly near a cotton-mill and a thriving vil- 
lage, which, as they rose about 1792, destroyed to Stewart the 
charms of the place as a residence. Stewart entered, at the 
age of eight, the High School of Edinburgh, where he had, 
in the latter years of his attendance, Dr. Adam for his instruc- 
tor, and where he was distinguished for the elegance of his 
translations, and early acquired that love for the prose and 
poetical works of ancient Rome which continued with him 
through life. He entered Edinburgh College in the session 
1765-66; that is, in his thirteenth year. I remember that 
Bacon, David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and many 
other original-minded men, entered college about the same age ; 
and I am strengthened in the conviction that, in order to 

1 "The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, edited by Sir William Hamilton, 
Bart., with a Memoir of Dugald Stewart, by John Veitch." 



276 DUGALD STEWART. [Art. xl. 

the production of fresh and independent thought, it is of ad- 
vantage to have the drilling in the ordinary elements all over 
at a comparatively early age, and then allow the mind, already 
well stocked with general knowledge, to turn its undivided 
energies to its favorite and evidently predestinated field ; and 
that the modern English plan of continuing the routine disci- 
pline in classics or mathematics till the age of twenty-two, 
while well fitted to produce good technical scholars, is not so 
well calculated to raise up great reformers in method and exe- 
cution. What the Scottish colleges have to deplore is not so 
much the juvenility of the entrants — though this has been 
carried to excess — as the total want of a provision for bringing 
to a point, for carrying on, for consolidating and condensing 
the scattered education which has been so well begun in the 
several classes. But to return to the college youth, we find 
him attending, among other classes, that of logic under Ste- 
venson, for two sessions ; that of moral philosophy under Adam 
Ferguson ; that of natural philosophy under Russell : and from 
all of these he received a stimulus and a bent which swayed 
him at the crisis of his being, and abode with him during the 
whole of his life. 

After finishing his course in Edinburgh, he went to Glasgow 
in 1 77 1, partly by the advice of Ferguson, that he might be 
under Dr. Thomas Reid, and partly with the view of being sent 
to Oxford on the Snell foundation, which has been of use to 
many students of Glasgow, but has in some respects been 
rather injurious to the college ; as it has led many to ascribe to 
it the mere reflected glory of being a training-school to higher 
institutions, whereas Glasgow should assert of itself that it is 
prepared to give as high an education as can be had in any 
university in the world. The youth seems at this time to have 
had thoughts of entering the Church of England ; and if he 
had gone south, he would no doubt, in that event, have dis- 
charged the duties of the episcopal office with great propriety 
and dignity. But a destiny better suited to his peculiar charac- 
ter and gifts was awaiting him. In the autumn of 1772 — that 
is, when he was at the age of nineteen — he became substitute 
for his father in the chair of mathematics in Edinburgh. It is 
precisely such an office as this, a tutorship or assistant profes- 
sorship, that the Scottish colleges should provide for their 



Art. xl.] HIS TEACHERS. 277 

more promising students ; an office not to be reserved for sons 
or personal friends of professors, but to be thrown open to 
public competition. This is the one thing needful to the Scot- 
tish universities, to enable them to complete the education 
which they commence so well, and to raise a body of learned 
youths, ready to compete with the tutors and fellows of Oxford 
and Cambridge. In 1775, Mr. Stewart was elected assistant 
and successor to his father ; in 1778, on Professor Adam Fer- 
guson going to America as secretary to a commission, he, 
upon a week's notice, lectured for him on morals ; and, in 1785, 
Ferguson having resigned, Stewart was appointed to the office 
for which he was so specially fitted, — to the chair of moral 
philosophy in the university of Edinburgh. 

We pause in the narrative, in order to look at the circum- 
stances which combined to influence the youth, to determine 
his career, and to fit him for the good work which he per- 
formed. First we have a mind, not certainly of bright original 
genius, or of great intellectual force, but with a blending of 
harmonious qualities, a capacity for inward reflection, and a 
disposition toward it, a fine taste, and consummate judgment. 
From his youth he breathed the air of a college. He was early 
introduced to Roman literature, and made it his model. Ste- 
venson used Wynne's " Abridgment of Locke's Essay " as a 
text-book, and from it the student may have caught the fresh 
and observational spirit which Locke had awakened, while, at 
the same time, he was kept from what Cousin describes as the 
common defect of the British philosophy — being "insular" — 
by the other text-books employed, namely, the " Elementa 
Philosophise " of Heineccius, and the " Determinationes On- 
tologicae " of De Vries ; works which discussed, in a more 
abstract and scholastic method, the questions agitated on the 
continent posterior to the publication of the philosophy of 
Descartes. A still greater influence was exercised over the 
youth by Ferguson, who, with no great metaphysical ability, 
but in an altogether Roman and in a somewhat pagan manner, 
discussed, with great majesty and sweep, the topics — of which 
the pupil was ever after so fond — lying between mental sci- 
ence on the one hand, and jurisprudence on the other. From 
his own father, and through his own academical teaching, he 
acquired a taste for the geometrical method, so well fitted to 



2;8 DUGALD STEWART. [Art. xl. 

give clearness and coherency to thought, and to teach caution 
in deduction. He thus became one of those metaphysicians 
(and they are not few) who have been mathematicians likewise, 
in this respect resembling (not to go back to Thales, Pythag- 
oras, and Plato, in ancient times) Descartes, Leibnitz, Samuel 
Clarke, Reid, and Kant. In the class of natural philosophy he 
was introduced to the Newtonian physics, which had been taught 
at an early date in Scotland, and caught an enthusiastic affec- 
tion for the inductive method and for Bacon, which continued 
with him through life, and is his characteristic among meta- 
physicians. But the teacher influencing him most, and, indeed, 
determining his whole philosophic career, was Thomas Reid, 
who, in a homely manner, but with unsurpassed shrewdness, 
and great independence and originality, was unfolding the 
principles of common sense, and thus laying a foundation for 
philosophy, while he undermined the scepticism of Hume. 
Stewart has found in Reid the model instructor, and it may 
be added that Reid has found in Stewart the model disciple. 
This whole course was an excellent training for a metaphy- 
sician : it would have been perfect if, along with his knowledge 
of natural philosophy, his somewhat dull apprehension had 
been whetted by an acquaintance — such as that of Locke in 
an earlier, and that of Brown in a later age — with the more 
fugitive and complicated phenomena of the physiology of the 
body ; and if, in addition, his over-cautious temper had been 
raised heavenward by an intimacy with the lofty spirit of Plato, 
or, better still, by an appreciation of the deep theological dis- 
cussions which had collected around them so much of the 
English and Scottish speculative intellect of the two preceding 
centuries. 

Like every other man not altogether self-contained, Stewart 
must have felt the spirit of his age, which, as coming in from 
every quarter, like air and sunshine, commonly exercises a 
greater influence on young men than individual teachers can 
possibly do through the special channels open to them. Hume 
had stirred the thoughts of thinkers to their greatest depths ; 
and this was now the age in which Hume had to be met. 
Stewart was born fourteen years after the publication of the 
great sceptical work of modern times, the " Treatise on 
Human Nature ; " and two years after the publication of the 



Art. xl.] STATE OF PHILOSOPHY IN SCOTLAND. 279 

work from which all modern utilitarianism has sprung, the 
" Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals." At the time 
when the youth was forming his convictions, Hume was living 
in Edinburgh, and the centre of an influence radiating round 
the man, who was a mixture of the lively, good-natured animal 
and of the intellectual giant, but with a terrible want of the 
high moral and spiritual. The original disposition of Stewart 
did not tempt him to daring speculation ; his domestic training 
must have prepossessed him against infidelity ; and he had been 
placed, in Glasgow, under the only opponent worthy of Hume, 
who had. appeared ; and so these earthquake shocks just made 
him look round for a means of settling fast the foundations of 
the temple of knowledge. 

Locke's philosophy had been the reigning one for the last 
age or two. Mr. Veitch speaks of the " tradition of sensation- 
alism, which the Scottish universities during the first half of 
the century, and up to the time of Reid, had in general dis- 
pensed in Scotland." This statement is too sweeping : for, 
first, Locke had given as high a place to reflection as to sensa- 
tion ; and, secondly, he had given a high office to intuition ; 
while, thirdly, Locke's philosophy had not been received in 
Scotland without modification, or in its worst aspects, as it had 
been in France. Stewart, like Reid, entertained a high ad- 
miration of Locke, and was unwilling to separate from him, 
but he saw at the same time the defects of Locke, and that 
there were fundamental laws in the mind which Locke had 
overlooked, or only incidentally noticed. In Glasgow he must 
have felt the influence left behind by a train of eminent men. 
There Hutcheson had been the founder of the genuine Scot- 
tish school. In Glasgow, too, Adam Smith had expounded those 
original views which he afterwards published in his " Theory of 
Moral Sentiments " and his " Wealth of Nations." In order 
to estimate the character of the age, it must also be taken into 
account that there was a strong expectation that results were 
to follow, from the application of inductive science, to mental 
phenomena, similar to those which had flowed from its appli- 
cation to physics. Turnbull's aim was to " apply himself to the 
study of the human mind, in the same way as to that of the 
human body, or to any other part of natural philosophy." Catch- 
ing this spirit, Reid was even now employing it to discover 



280 DUGALD STEWART. [Art. xl. 

principles deeper than any that had been systematically no- 
ticed by Locke, by Hutcheson, or any Scottish philosopher. 
To this same noble work Stewart now devoted himself ; but 
seeking, meanwhile, to combine with the profound philosophy 
of Reid a literary excellence like that of Hume and Smith. 

And this leads us to notice that we cannot form any thing 
like an adequate idea of the influences which combined to 
mould the character of Stewart, who cultivated literature as 
eagerly as he did philosophy, without taking into account that 
he lived in an age of great literary revival in Scotland. The 
union between Scotland and England being now compacted, it 
was seen that the old Scottish dialect must gradually disap- 
pear ; and ambitious youths were anxious to get rid of their 
northern idioms, and even grave seniors, including noblemen 
and dignified doctors, like Robertson (as we learn from Lord 
Campbell's " Life of Loughborough"), had formed a society, in 
order to be delivered from their Scottish pronunciation. A 
company of authors had sprung up, determined to assert their 
place among the classical writers of England ; and this had 
been already allowed to Hume, to Robertson and Smith, and 
was being allowed to Beattie. Stewart had, no doubt, an ambi- 
tion to take his place among the classical writers of Scotland. 

While pursuing his studies at Glasgow, he read a paper on 
"Dreaming" before a literary society in connection with the 
university ; and he subsequently read the same paper to a sim- 
ilar society in Edinburgh. The theory here started was after- 
wards embodied in his " Elements," and contains certainly not 
the whole truth on this mysterious subject, but still a truth, 
namely, that in dreaming the will is in abeyance, and the mind 
follows a spontaneous train. In the Edinburgh society he also 
read papers on " Taste," on " Cause and Effect," and " Scepti- 
cism." The fact that such topics were discussed is a sign of 
the spirit which prevailed among the youth of Scotland at that 
time. It is worthy of being noticed that at Glasgow he boarded 
in the same house with Mr. Alison, who afterwards, in his essay 
on " Taste," carried out the theory which had been started by 
Beattie in his " Dissertation on Imagination," as to the feel- 
ing of beauty being produced by the association of ideas. 

Quitting his course of training, we may now view him as 
delivering his professorial lectures in the class-room in Edin- 



Art. xl.] AS A LECTURER. 281 

burgh. By far the liveliest account of him is by Lord Cock- 
burn. It is worthy of being read again by those who may 
have seen it before. 

" He was about the middle size, weakly limbed, and with an appearance 
of feebleness which gave an air of delicacy to his gait and structure. His 
forehead was large and bald ; his eyebrows bushy ; his eyes gray and in- 
telligent, and capable of conveying any emotion from indignation to pity, 
from serene sense to hearty humor, in which they were powerfully aided by 
his lips, which, though rather large perhaps, were flexible and expressive. 
The voice was singularly pleasing ; and, as he managed it, a slight burr 
only made its tones softer. His ear both for music and for speech was 
exquisite ; and he was the finest reader I have ever heard. His gesture 
was simple and elegant, though not free from a tinge of professional formal- 
ity, and his whole manner that of an academical gentleman. . . . He lec- 
tured standing, from notes which, with their successive additions, must, I 
suppose, at last have been nearly as full as his spoken words. His lectur- 
ing manner was professorial, but gentlemanlike, calm and expository, but 
rising into greatness, or softening into tenderness, whenever his subject 
required it. A slight asthmatic tendency made him often clear his throat ; 
and such was my admiration of the whole exhibition, that Macvey Napier 
told him not long ago that I had said there was eloquence in his very spit- 
ting. ' Then,' said he, ' I am glad there was at least one thing in which I 
had no competitor.' ... To me, his lectures were like the opening of the 
heavens. I felt that I had a soul. His noble views, unfolded in glorious 
sentences, elevated me into a higher world." 

There were hearers who felt that there was a want in his 
expositions, and there are readers still who feel in the same 
way. Ardent youths, like Brown and Chalmers, looked on him 
as timid and over-cautious. Chalmers wrote in 1801 : "I at- 
tend his lectures regularly. I must confess I have been rather 
disappointed. I never heard a single discussion of Stewart's 
which made up one masterly and comprehensive whole. His 
lectures seem to me to be made up of detached hints and in- 
complete outlines, and he almost uniformly avoids every sub- 
ject which involves any difficult discussion." Chalmers lived 
to proclaim him the highest of academic moralists. Still there 
was ground, in appearance and in reality, for the early criticism. 
In his writings he adopts the plan which Dr. Robertson took 
credit for introducing, that of throwing a great deal of his mat- 
ter into notes and illustrations. This method, carried to the 
extent to which it has been done by Robertson, Stewart, and 
M'Crie, is a radically defective one, as it interrupts the flow of 



282 DUGALD STEWART. [Art. xl. 

the discourse, and, with this, the interest in and comprehension 
of the whole. He has a most sensitive aversion to all such 
bold speculations as Leibnitz indulged in, and is jealous of all 
such consecutive deductions as Descartes and Kant have 
drawn out. He has no ability for sharp analysis, and he looks 
on a high abstraction with as great terror as some men do on 
ghosts. He studiously avoids close discussion, and flinches 
from controversy ; he seems afraid of fighting with an oppo- 
nent, lest it should exhibit him in no seemly attitudes. Sel- 
dom does he venture on a bold assertion, and, when he does, 
he takes shelter immediately after behind an authority. Deter- 
mined to sustain his dignity and keep up his flow of language, 
he often takes rounded sentences and paragraphs to bring out 
what a more direct mind would have expressed in a single 
clinching clause, or even by an expressive epithet. Often does 
the eager, ingenuous youth, in reading his pages, wish that he 
would but lay aside ceremony for a very little, and speak out 
frankly and heartily. 

Still we should form a very unjust opinion of Stewart, if, 
in consequence of weaknesses, we thought him devoid of 
originality, independence, or profundity. We certainly do not 
claim for him the sagacity of Locke, or the speculative genius 
of Leibnitz, or a power of generalizing details equal to Adam 
Smith, or the shrewdness of Reid, or the logical grasp of Kant 
and Hamilton, and I admit that he was inferior to all these 
men in originality ; but he has admirable qualities of his own, — 
in soundness of judgment he is more to be trusted than any of 
them ; and, if he is without some of their excellencies, he is 
also without some of their faults. He has no such rash and un- 
measured diatribes as Locke's assault on innate ideas ; no such 
extravagances as the monadical theory of Leibnitz ; no such 
wasting of ingenuity as Smith's theory in his " Moral Senti- 
ments ; " he does not commit such gross misapprehensions in 
scholarship as Reid does ; and he never allows any logic to con- 
duct h;m to such preposterous conclusions as Kant and Hamil- 
ton landed themselves in, when they declared causation to be 
a law of thought and not of things. I have noticed that in 
many cases Stewart hides his originality as carefully as others 
boast of theirs. Often have I found, after going the round of 
philosophers in seeking light on some abstruse subject, that, on 



Art. xl.] HIS INFLUENCE AND HIS PUPILS. 283 

turning to Stewart, his doctrine is, after all, the most profound, 
as it Is the most judicious. 

I do not mean to enter into the details of his remaining 
life. In 1783, he married a Miss Bannatyne of Glasgow, who 
died in 1787, leaving an only child, afterwards Colonel Stewart. 
He spent the summers of 1788 and 1789 on the Continent. In 
the appendix to the Memoir, there is a selection from the letters 
which he wrote to his friends at home. Though written in the 
midst of instructive scenes, and on the eve of great events, 
they are excessively general and common-place, and display no 
shrewdness of observation. In 1790, he married a daughter of 
Lord Cranston, a lady of high accomplishments, fascinating 
manners, and literary tastes. His house now became the re- 
sort of the best society of Edinburgh, and he himself the 
centre and bond of an accomplished circle, at a time when the 
metropolis of Scotland in the winter months was the resi- 
dence of many of the principal Scottish families, and of persons 
of high literary and scientific eminence. The weekly reunions 
in his house, which happily blended the aristocracies of rank 
and letters, bringing together the peer and the unfriended 
scholar, were for many years the source of an influence that 
most beneficially affected the society of the capital. His influ- 
ence was extended by his receiving into his house, as boarders, 
young men chiefly of rank and fortune. In his classes of 
moral philosophy and of political economy, he had under him a 
greater body of young men who afterwards distinguished them- 
selves, than any other teacher that I can think of. Among 
them we have to place Lord Brougham, Lord Palmerston, Lord 
John Russell, Francis Horner, Lord Lansdowne, Francis Jef- 
frey, Walter Scott, Sydney Smith, Thomas Brown, Thomas 
Chalmers, James Mill, Archibald Alison, and many others who 
have risen to great eminence in politics, in literature, or philos- 
ophy ; and most of these have acknowledged the good which 
they derived from his lectures, while some of them have 
carried out in practical measures the principles which he incul- 
cated. He seems, in particular, to have kindled a fine enthusi- 
asm in the breast of Francis Horner, who ever speaks of him 
in terms of loftiest admiration, and, though cut off in early life, 
lived long enough to exhibit the high moral aims which he had 
imbibed from the lessons of Stewart. 



284 DUGALD STEWART. [Art. xl. 

It was in 1 792 that the first volume of his " Elements " was pub- 
lished. In 1793, appeared his " Outlines of Moral Philosophy," 
containing an epitome of the doctrines expanded in his larger 
writings. His other works appeared after successive intervals : 
his Account of Adam Smith in 1793, of Robertson in 1796, and 
of Reid in 1802 ; his " Philosophical Essays "in 18 10 ; the second 
volume of his " Elements " in 18 14 ; the first part of his Disserta- 
tion, in 181 5, and the second in 1821 ; the third volume of his 
"Elements " in 1827 ; and the "Active and Moral Powers" in 
1828. The lectures on Political Economy, were not published 
till 1856. 

In 1805, he threw himself, with more eagerness than he was 
wont to display in public matters, into the controversy which 
arose about the appointment of Leslie — a man of high scien- 
tific eminence, but with a great deal of the gross animal in his 
nature — to the chair of mathematics. He wrote a pamphlet 
on the subject, and appeared in the General Assembly of the 
Church of Scotland, as a Presbyterian elder, to aid the evan- 
gelical party, who, under the leadership of Sir Henry Moncreiff, 
were no way inclined to join the moderate party in their at- 
tempt to keep out a distinguished man, because he entertained 
certain views on the subject of physical causation, and to retain 
the college chairs for themselves. In his speech on the occa- 
sion, Stewart does let out feeling for once, and it is mingled 
pride and scorn. "After having discharged for more than 
thirty years (not, I trust, without discredit to myself) the im- 
portant duties of my academical station, I flatter myself that 
the House does not think it incumbent on me to descend to 
philosophical controversies with such antagonists. Such of the 
members, at least, as I have the honor to be known to, wili not, 
I am confident, easily allow themselves to be persuaded that I 
would have committed myself rashly and wantonly on a ques- 
tion in which the highest interests of mankind are involved." 
In delivering the speech from which the above is an extract, 
he was called to order, and, not being accustomed to such hand- 
ling, he sat down abruptly. The motion of Sir Henry Moncreiff 
was carried by a majority, which occasioned great joy to the 
Edinburgh Liberals, and helped to sever the connection be- 
tween the universities and the church. 

In 1806, the Whig party, being in power, procured for him a sin- 



Art. xl.] HIS LATER YEARS. 285 

ecure office, entitled the writership of the " Edinburgh Gazette," 
with a salary of 300/. a year. In 1 809, he was in a precarious state 
of health, much aggravated by the death of a son by his second 
wife, and he asked Dr. Thomas Brown to lecture for him. In 
18 10, Brown, being strongly recommended to the Town Coun- 
cil by Stewart, was appointed conjoint professor, and henceforth 
discharged all the duties of the office. Brown never attacked 
Stewart, but he openly assailed Reid ; and we suppose the 
intimacy between Stewart and Brown henceforth could not 
have been great. Stewart delivered his ultimate estimate of 
Brown in a note appended to the third volume of the " Ele- 
ments." There is evidently keen feeling underlying it ; but 
the criticism is, on the whole, a fair and just one. Stewart 
now lived, till the close of his life, at Kinniel House, Linlith- 
gowshire, — a residence placed at his service by the Duke of 
Hamilton Henceforth he was chiefly employed in maturing 
and arranging the philosophical works which he published. 
The details given of this part of his life are scanty and unin- 
structive. In 1820, he came forth to support Sir James Mack- 
intosh as successor to Brown ; and when Sir James declined the 
office, Stewart recommended Sir William Hamilton, who seems 
ever afterwards to have cherished a feeling of gratitude to- 
wards Stewart. The election fell on Professor Wilson, who, 
while the fittest man living for the chair of rhetoric and 
belles-lettres, had no special qualifications for a chair of 
philosophy. 

In 1822, Mr. Stewart had a stroke of paralysis, from which, 
however, he partially recovered. Mrs. Stewart describes him, 
in 1824, as troubled with a difficulty of speech, and a tremor in 
his hand, as walking two or three hours every day, as cheerful 
in his spirits, his mind as acute as ever, and as amusing himself 
with reading on his favorite pursuits, and with the classics. He 
had just given to the world his work on the " Active Powers," 
and was on a visit to a friend in Edinburgh, when he died on 
nth June, 1828. He was buried in the family vault in the 
Canongate. There is a monument in honor of him on the 
Calton Hill ; but the fittest memorial of him is to be found, 
first, in his pupils, who have done a good work in their day, 
and now in his writings, which may do a good work for ages to 
come. 



286 DUGALD STEWART. [Art. xl. 

His collected works have been edited by Sir William Hamil- 
ton. The editor has not enriched it with such notes as he has 
appended to his edition of Reid, — notes distinguished for the 
very qualities which Reid was deficient in, extensive scholar- 
ship and rigid analysis. Sir William Hamilton, in undertaking 
the work, stipulated that Mr. Stewart's writings should be pub- 
lished without note or comment. I rather think that Ham- 
ilton had not such a sympathy with the elegant and cautious 
disciple as with the shrewd and original master. Besides, 
elaborate notes to Stewart must have been very much a repeti- 
tion of his notes to Reid. In this edition Hamilton is tempted 
at times to depart from his rule : he does give us a note or 
comment when the subject is a favorite one, such as the free- 
dom of the will ; and often must he have laid a restraint on 
himself, in not pruning or amending to a greater extent. But 
the value of this edition consists in its being complete, in its 
having references supplied, and one index after another, and 
in its containing additions from Stewart's manuscripts, and 
these often of great value, both in themselves and as illustrating 
Stewart's philosophy. Sir William Hamilton was cut off before 
the edition was completed, but Mr. Veitch has carried on the 
work in the same manner and spirit. Having said so much of 
this fine edition, we must protest against the occasional trans- 
lation of the language and views of Stewart into those of 
Hamilton, in places where it is purported to give us Stewart 
himself. Thus, in index, vol. iv., p. 408, Stewart is repre- 
sented as, in a place referred to, discussing the question as to 
whether some of our notions be not " native or a priori!' but, 
on looking up the page, no such language is used ; and the 
same remark holds good of vol. v., p. 474, where Stewart is 
spoken of as describing our notions both of matter and mind as 
merely "phenomenal," a view thoroughly Kantian and Hamil- 
tonian, and not sanctioned by Stewart. I must be allowed, 
also, to disapprove of the liberty taken with the " Outlines 
of Moral Philosophy," which is cut up into three parts, and 
appears in three distinct volumes. This is the most condensed 
and direct of all Stewart's writings : it contains an abridgment 
of his whole doctrines ; it is one of the best text-books ever 
written, and it should have appeared in its unity, as Stewart 
left it. 



Art. xl.] HIS DISSERTATION. 287 

I do not propose to criticise these ten massive volumes of 
his works. This would be a heavy work to my readers : it 
would almost be equivalent to a criticism of all modern philos- 
ophy. Nevertheless, I must touch on some topics of an in- 
teresting and important kind, as discussed by Stewart, and 
again discussed by later writers on mental science. 

The first volume of the collected works contains the " Dis- 
sertation on the Progress of Metaphysical and Ethical Philos- 
ophy." I look upon it as the finest of the dissertations in the 
" Encyclopaedia Britannica " ; and this is no mean praise, when we 
consider the number of eminent men who have written for that 
work. I regard it, indeed, as, upon the whole, the best disser- 
tation which ever appeared in a philosophical serial. As a his- 
tory of modern philosophy, especially of British philosophy, 
it has not been superseded, and, I believe, never will be set 
aside. It is pre-eminent for its fine literary taste, its high 
moral tone, its general accuracy, its comprehensiveness of sur- 
vey, and its ripeness of wisdom. When we read it, we feel as 
if we were breathing a pure and healthy atmosphere, and that 
the whole spirit of the work is cheering, as being so full of 
hope in the progress of knowledge. Its critical strictures are 
ever candid, generally mild, very often just, and always worthy 
of being noted and pondered. The work is particularly pleas- 
ing in the account given of those who have contributed by their 
literary works to diffuse a taste for metaphysical studies, such 
as Montaigne, Bayle, Fontenelle, and Addison. It should be 
admitted that the author has scarcely done justice to Grotius, 
and failed to fathom the depth of such minds as Leibnitz and 
Jonathan Edwards. I agree, moreover, with those who regret 
that he should ever have been tempted to enter on a criticism 
of Kant, whose works he knew only from translations and im- 
perfect compends. 

The next three volumes contain the " Elements of the Philos- 
ophy of the Human Mind," and are introduced by a portion of 
the " Outlines of Moral Philosophy." In the first volume of 
the "Elements" and in the opening of the second, he spreads 
out before us a classification of the intellectual powers, — as 
perception, attention, conception, abstraction, association of 
ideas, memory, imagination, and reason. The list is at once 
defective and redundant. Stewart acknowledges self-con- 



288 DUGALD STEWART. [Art. xl. 

sciousness, which is an inseparable concomitant of all the pres- 
ent operations of the mind, to be a separate attribute ; and in 
this he seems to be right, inasmuch as it looks at a special 
object, namely, self in the existing state, and gives us a distinct 
class of ideas, namely, the qualities of self, such as thinking 
and feeling. Yet it is curious that, while he gives it half a page 
in his " Outlines," it has no separate place in the "Elements." It 
is also a singular circumstance that Reid dismisses it in the 
same summary way. An inductive observation, with an analy- 
sis of the precise knowledge given us by self-consciousness, 
would give a solid foundation for the doctrine of human per- 
sonality, and clear away the greater part of the confusion and 
error lingering in the metaphysics of our day. Nor is there 
any proper account given in the " Elements " of that important 
group of faculties which discover relations among the objects 
known by sense-perception and consciousness. The omis- 
sion of this class of attributes has led him into a meagre nom- 
inalism, very unlike the general spirit of his philosophy. He 
restricts the word conception to the mere imaging power of 
the mind, and even to the picturing of bodily objects, as if we 
could not represent mental objects as well, as, for example, 
ourselves or others in joy or sorrow. In a later age, Hamilton 
has confined the term in an opposite direction to the logical 
or general notion. Stewart's classification is also redundant. 
Attention is not a separate faculty, but is an exercise of will, — 
roused, it may be, by feeling, and fixing the mind on a present 
object. He does not seem to know what to make of reason 
as a distinct faculty ; and, as defined by him, it ought to include 
abstraction, which is certainly a rational exercise. But, if the 
work is defective in logical grasp, it excels in its descriptions 
of concrete operations, and in its explanations and elucidations 
of phenomena presenting themselves in real life. All his works 
are replete with those "intermediate axioms" which Bacon 
commends as most useful of all, as being removed equally 
from the lowest axioms, which differ but little from particu- 
lars, and from the highest and most general, which are no- 
tional, abstract, and of no weight ; whereas the " intermediate 
are true, solid, full of life, and upon them depend the business 
and fortune of mankind." The fine reflection and lofty elo- 
quence of Stewart come out most pleasingly and instructively 



Art. xl.] KNOWLEDGE OF SELF. 289 

in all those passages in which he treats of association and 
imagination. 

On one important point, discussed frequently in the " Ele- 
ments," the school of Reid and Stewart was led into error by their 
excessive caution, and by being awed so much by the authority 
of Locke. Reid maintained in a loose way, that we do not 
know substance, but qualities ; and Stewart wrought this view 
into a system. We are not, he says, properly speaking, conscious 
of self or the existence of self : we are conscious merely of a 
sensation or some other quality, which, by a subsequent sug- 
gestion of the understanding, leads to a belief in that which 
exercijes the quality. — ("Phil. Essays," p. 58, etc.) This I 
must regard as a radically defective doctrine. We do not know 
intuitively a quality of self apart from self ; we know both in 
one primitive, concrete act, and it is only by a subsequent op- 
eration that we separate in thought the quality which may 
change in its action from the self or substance which abideth. 
Descartes erred I think, when he represented the mental pro- 
cess as being " cogito, ergo sum : " the primitive cognition is of 
the ego cogitans. But I look on Stewart as equally erring when 
he says, that there is first a sensation and then a belief in 
self. In a later age, Sir William Hamilton connected the qual- 
itative theory of Stewart with the phe7iomenal theory of Kant. 
In doing so he was guilty, I must take the liberty of saying, 
of a great and inexcusable blunder. Stewart would have repu- 
diated the phenomenal theory of Kant as at all identical with 
his own. Stewart, no doubt, speaks of the phenomena of the 
mind ; but he means by phenomena not, as Kant did, appear- 
ances, but individual facts to be referred to a law ; and quali- 
ties with him were realities. But, legitimately or illegitimately, 
Hamilton identifying the qualitative theory with the phenom- 
enal, deduces from them a system of relativity, which ended 
in nihilism, or at least in nescience. I am glad to notice that 
Mr. Mansel, notwithstanding his great and just admiration of 
Hamilton, has emancipated himself from this fundamental er- 
ror. He proclaims, " I am immediately conscious of myself, 
seeing and hearing, willing and thinking." — (" Proleg. Logica," 
p. 129 ; also Art. Metaph. in " Encyc. Brit."). I have sometimes 
thought that, if Stewart had foreseen all the logical conse- 
quences to be deduced from his views, he would have fallen 

19 



290 DUGALD STEWART. [Art. xl. 

back on the same common-sense doctrine. I regret that Mr. 
Mansel has not gone a step farther, and placed our cognition 
of matter on the same footing in this respect as our knowledge 
of mind. I am sure, at least, that this would be altogether 
in the spirit of Reid and Stewart. I maintain that, just as 
by self-consciousness we know self as exercising such and such 
a quality, say thinking or feeling, so, by sense-perception, we 
know a body as extended and exercising power or energy. 
This is the simplest doctrine : it seems to be the only one 
consistent with consciousness, and is the proper doctrine of 
natural realism as distinguished from an artificial system of rel- 
ativity. 

In the second volume of the " Elements," after a feeble and 
chiefly verbal disquisition on reason, he proceeds to treat of 
the " fundamental laws of belief." I reckon the phrase a very 
happy one, and a great improvement on "common sense," 
which labors under the disadvantage of being ambiguous ; 
inasmuch as it usually denotes that unbought, untaught sagac- 
ity, which is found only in certain men, and which others can 
never acquire, whereas it can be admitted into philosophical 
discussion only when it denotes principles which are regu- 
lating the minds of all. I have a remark to make as to the 
place in which he discusses these fundamental laws. It is 
after he has gone over the greater number of the faculties, and 
he seems to treat them as involved in reason. And I ac- 
knowledge that there may be some advantages in first going 
over the faculties and then speaking of these fundamental laws. 
But we must guard against the idea that these principles are 
not involved in the faculties which he has previously gone over ; 
such as, perception, abstraction, and memory. The " funda- 
mental laws " are not to be regarded as different from the 
faculties : they are, in fact, the necessary laws of the facul- 
ties, and guiding their exercise. These laws work in all minds, 
infant and mature, sane and insane. M. Morel was asked to 
examine a prisoner who seemed to be deranged, and he asked 
him how old he was ; to which the prisoner replied : " 245 
francs, 35 centimes, 124 carriages," etc. To the same question, 
more distinctly asked, he replied, : " 5 metres, 75 centimetres." 
When asked how long he had been deranged, he answered : 
"Cats, always cats." M. Morel at once declared his madness 



Art. xl.] HIS VIEW OF CAUSATION. 29 1 

to be simulated, and states : " In their extreme aberrations, in 
their most furious delirium, madmen do not confound what it 
is impossible for the most extravagant logic to confound. There 
is no madman who loses the idea of cause, of substance, of 
existence." (See " Psychol. Journal," Oct. 1857.) 

Stewart's doctrine of causation seems to me to be deficient 
and inadequate. He is altogether right in calling it a funda- 
mental law of belief, which necessitates the mind to rise from 
an effect to a cause. But he does not seem to observe all that 
is involved in the cause. He gives in too far to Hume on this 
subject, and prepares the way for Brown's theory. He does 
not see, in particular, that causation springs from power being 
in the substance or substances which act as the cause, and that 
we intuitively discover power to be in substances both mental 
and material. His distinction between efficient and physical 
cause is of a superficial and confused character. It may be all 
true that, in looking at physical action, we may not know intu- 
itively where the full efficiency resides, whether in the physical 
object alone or in mind (the divine) acting in it ; but we are 
certain that there is an efficiency somewhere in some sub- 
stance. I am by no means sure that he is right in limiting 
power in the sense of efficiency to mental action. I agree here 
with the criticisms of Cousin (as indeed I agree with most of 
the criticisms of Cousin on the Scottish school) where he says 
that, while our first idea of cause may be derived from our own 
voluntary action, we are at the same time intuitively led to 
ascribe potency to other objects ' also ; and that Reid and 
Stewart, in denying that we discover efficiency in body, are 
acting contrary to their own principles of common sense, and 
in contradiction to the universal opinion of the human race, 
which is, that fire burns and light shines. (See Cousin, " Phil. 
Ecoss.," p. 437, ed. 1857.) Stewart has also failed, as it appears 
to me, to give the proper account of the intuition which regu- 
lates and underlies our investigations of nature. This is not, 
as he represents it, a belief in the uniformity of nature ; a 
belief which appears to me to be the result of experience, which 
experience, as it discovers the rule, may also announce the 
exceptions. The child does not believe, nor does the savage 
believe, nature to be uniform. The underlying beliefs, which 
carry us on in our investigations of nature are those of identity, 



292 DUGALD STEWART. [Art. xl. 

of being, of substance and quality, of cause and effect. Hence 
it is quite possible to prove a miracle which may not be in 
conformity with the uniformity of nature, but is quite compati- 
ble, as Brown has shown, with our intuitive belief in causation ; 
for when creature power fails we can believe in creative. 

It is in the second volume of the " Elements " that we find the 
logical disquisitions of Stewart. He has utterly failed in his 
strictures on Aristotle's logic. The school of Locke, and the 
school of Condillac, and the school of Reid, have all failed in 
constructing a logic of inference which can stand a sifting 
examination. The Aristotelian analysis of reasoning stands 
at this moment untouched in its radical positions. The objec- 
tions of Campbell and Stewart have been answered by Whately, 
who shows that the syllogism is not a new or peculiar mode of 
reasoning, but an analytic of the process which passes through 
the mind when it reasons. In giving an adherence to the 
Aristotelian analysis, I admit that improvements were wrought 
in it by that school of logicians which has sprung from Kant, 
and of which Hamilton was the leader in Great Britain, fol- 
lowed by such eminent men as Mansel, Thomson, and Spalding. 
But their improvements ought not to be admitted till the formal 
logicians thoroughly deliver their exposition of the laws of 
thought from all that false Kantian metaphysics which repre- 
sents thought as giving to the objects a "form " which is not in 
the objects themselves. Besides, I cannot allow logic to be an 
a priori science except under an explanation : I admit that the 
laws of thought operate in the mind prior to all experience ; but 
I maintain that they can be discovered by us only a posteriori, 
and by a generalization of their individual actings. 

But while we may thus expect a perfected universal logic, 
treating of the laws of thought as laws of thought, — not inde- 
pendent of objects, but whatever be the objects, — I hope there 
will grow up alongside a particular logic, which will be a more 
practically useful logic, to consider the laws of thought as di- 
rected to particular classes of objects, and to treat of such top- 
ics as demonstrative and probable evidence, induction, and 
analogy. In regard to this latter logic, Stewart must ever be 
referred to as an authority. So far, indeed, as the theory of 
definitions and axioms is concerned, I prefer very much the 
view of Whewell, as developed in his " Philosophy of the Indue- 



Art. xl.] HIS LOGICAL DISQUISITIONS. 293 

tive Sciences." But, in regard to induction, I believe that 
Stewart's account of it is, upon the whole, the best which ap- 
peared from the time of Bacon down to his own age. Since 
his time, we have two great works, which have left every other 
far behind, — that of Whewell and that of Mr. John Stuart 
Mill. Not that I regard either of these as perfect. Dr. 
Whewell has exaggerated the place of the mental element, and 
has expressed it in most unfortunate phraseology, such as " fun- 
damental ideas " and " conceptions," terms which have been 
used in twenty different significations, and are used by him to 
denote that the mind superinduces on the facts something not in 
the facts, whereas the mental power merely discovers what is in 
the facts. Mr. Mill, on the other hand, has overlooked the 
mental element altogether, and denies all necessary and uni- 
versal truth. We may hope, in future years, to have a perfect 
inductive logic by a judicious combination of these two works ; 
but this can be done only by a man of the same high intel- 
lectual stature as Whewell and Mill, and this will seldom be 
met with. It is to be regretted that, since the days of Stew- 
art, there is not a single Scotchman who has presented a work 
on induction, of any name or value. 1 In regard to analogy, the 
discoveries as to the typical forms of animals and plants and 
evolution will enable logicians to give a far more comprehensive 
and yet more stringent view of reasoning from analogy than 
has been done by Stewart, by Whewell, or by Mill. 

The third volume of the " Elements " treats of certain concrete 
and practical matters, which Stewart was peculiarly qualified 
to discuss, and which bring out some of the finer qualities of 
his mind. All his disquisitions had tended to become verbal ; 
and here he treats expressly of language, which he does with 
fine discernment, but falls into a great blunder in regard to 

1 It is an interesting circumstance that, perhaps, the fairest estimate which we 
have of Bacon and the inductive system is by a German, Kuno Fischer, in his 
" Francis Bacon of Verulam " (translated by Oxenford). He errs, however, after 
the usual German mode of theorizing, in connecting Bacon with such men as 
Hobbes and Hume, the former of whom never professed to follow the Baconian 
method, and the latter of whom formed a very low estimate of Bacon, and has 
been most effectively met by Reid and Stewart, who professedly and really 
adopted the inductive system. This has been shown by Remusat, in his pleas- 
antly written and judicious work, " Bacon : Sa Vie, son Temps, sa Philosophic ; " 
where there is a just estimate of Bacon's general philosophy, and some good re- 
marks on the metaphysical points involved in induction. 



294 DUGALD STEWART. [Art. xl. 

Sanscrit, which he represents as of comparatively late origin, 
and analogous to mediaeval Latin, whereas it has a literature 
reaching back at least twelve hundred years before Christ. He 
has some interesting, though by no means profound, remarks 
on the sympathetic affections. But by far the finest parts of 
the volume are those in which he treats of the varieties of in- 
tellectual character, and of the peculiarities of the metaphysi- 
cian, the mathematician, the poet, and the sexes. Thus, of the 
mere metaphysician, he says, that, "he cannot easily submit 
to the task of examining details, or of ascertaining facts, and is 
apt to seize on a few data as first principles, following them 
out boldly to their remotest consequences, and afterwards em- 
ploying his ingenuity to reconcile, by means of false refine- 
ments, his theoretical assumptions with the exceptions which 
seem to contradict them." He shows that the metaphysician 
is safe from the checks met with in physics, "where speculative 
mistakes are contradicted by facts which strike our senses." 
Again, of mathematics, he says, " that, while they increase 
the faculty of reasoning or deduction, they give no employment 
to the other powers of the understanding concerned in the 
investigation of truth." He adds : " I have never met a mere 
mathematician who was not credulous to excess." 

In the same volume he discusses cautiously and judiciously 
the comparison between the faculties of man and brutes. I 
suspect, however, that the theory has not yet been devised — 
it has certainly not been published — which is fitted to give a 
satisfactory account of the relation of the brute to the human 
faculties. I suppose that Bonnet is right when he says that we 
shall never be able to understand the nature of brute instinct, 
till we are in the dog's head without being the dog. It is cer- 
tain that we have at this moment nothing deserving of the name 
of science on this subject. I have sometimes thought that the 
modern doctrine of homologues and analogues, if extended and 
modified to suit the new object, might supply the key to enable 
us to express some of the facts. Certain of the brute qualities 
are merely analogous to those of man (as the wing of a butter- 
fly is analogous to that of a bird) ; others are homologues, but 
inferior in degree ; while there are qualities in man different in 
kind from any in the brute. Aristotle called brute instincts, 
[h{i?;[mtcc rrjg dvdQaimvrjg farjg. They would be more accurately 
described as anticipations or types of the coming archetype. 



Art. xl.] HIS CRITICISM OF LOCKE. 295 

The volume closes with an account of James Mitchell, a boy 
born blind and dumb. 

The " Philosophical Essays " are an episode in his system as 
a whole, even as his numerous notes and illustrations are epi- 
sodes in the individual volumes. I am tempted, in looking at 
them, to take up two of the subjects discussed, as a deep inter- 
est still collects around them, and the questions agitated cannot 
yet be regarded as settled. 

Every careful reader of Locke's " Essay " must have observed 
two elements running through all his philosophy, — the one, a 
sensational, or rather to do justice to Locke, who ever refers to 
reflection as a separate source of ideas, an experiential element, 
and the other a rational. In the opening of the " Essay " he 
denies innate ideas apparently in every sense, and affirms that 
the materials of all our ideas are derived from sensation and 
reflection ; but, as he advances, his language is, that by these 
sources ideas are " suggested and furnished to the mind " (the 
language adopted by Reid and Stewart) ; he calls in faculties 
with high functions to work on the materials ; speaks of ideas 
which are " creatures and inventions of the understanding ; " 
appeals to " natural law " and the " principles of common rea- 
son ; " and in the Fourth Book gives a very high, or rather deep, 
place to intuition ; says we have an intuitive knowledge of our 
own existence ; speaks of the " mind perceiving truth as the eye 
doth light, only by being directed toward it ; " declares that, in 
the " discovery of and assent to these truths, there is no use of 
the discursive faculty, no need of reasoning, but they are known 
by a superior and higher degree of evidence," and talks even of 
a " necessary connection of ideas." It unfortunately happened 
that in France, to which Locke was introduced by Voltaire and 
the encyclopedists, they took the sensational element alone, and 
the effect on thought and on morality was most disastrous. 
Unfortunately, too, Locke has become known in Germany, 
chiefly through France, and hence we find him, all over the 
Continent, described both by friends and foes as a sensational- 
ist ; and the charge has been re-echoed in Great Britain by Sir 
William Hamilton and Dr. Morell. Yet it is quite certain that 
Locke has an intellectual as well as a sensational side. 1 I have, 

1 The intellectual side has been brought out to view by Henry Rogers, Pro- 
fessor Bowen of Harvard, and Professor Webb of Dublin. 



296 DUGALD STEWART. [Art. xl. 

in a careful perusal of the " Essay," mainly for this very end, 
discovered in every book, and in the majority even of the chap- 
ters, both sides of the shield ; but I confess that I have not 
been able to discover the line that joins them. I do not think 
that Stewart's remarks on this subject are exhaustive or deci- 
sive : he is evidently wrong in supposing that Locke identified 
reflection with the reason which discovers truth, but his strict- 
ures are always candid and sometimes just. 

In the " Philosophical Essays," Stewart has many fine obser- 
vations on taste and beauty. On this subject he was favorably 
disposed towards the theory of his friend Mr. Alison, and he 
ascribes more than he should have done to the association of 
ideas. But he never gave his adhesion to this hypothesis as a 
full explanation of the phenomena. " If there was nothing," he 
says, " originally and intrinsically pleasing or beautiful, the asso- 
ciating principle would have no materials on which it could 
operate." The theory of association was never favorably re- 
ceived by artists, and has been abandoned by all metaphysicians. 
The tendency now is to return to the deeper views which had 
been expounded long ago by Plato, and, I may add, by Augus- 
tine. I find that Stewart refers to the doctrine of Augustine, 
who " represents beauty as consisting in that relation of the 
parts of a whole to each other which constitutes its unity ; " and 
all that he has to say of it is : " The theory certainly is not of 
great value, but the attempt is curious." The aesthetical writers 
of our age would be inclined to say of it that there is more 
truth in it than in all the speculations of Alison, Stewart, 
Jeffrey, and Brown. It may be safely said that, while earnest 
inquirers have had pleasant glimpses of beauty, to no one has 
she revealed her full charms. When such writers as Cousin, 
Ruskin, and Macvicar dwell so much on unity, harmony, pro- 
portion, I am tempted to ask them : Does then the feeling of 
beauty not arise till we have discovered such qualities as pro- 
portion, unity, and harmony ? And if they answer in the affirm- 
ative, then I venture to show them that they are themselves 
holding a sort of association theory ; for they affirm that the 
beautiful object does not excite emotion till, as a sign, it calls 
forth certain ideas, — I suspect of truth and goodness. I am not 
quite sure that we can go the length of this school, when they 
speak of beauty as a quality necessary, immutable, eternal, like 



Art. xl.] ACTIVE AND MORAL POWERS. 297 

truth and moral good, and connect it so essentially with the 
very nature of God. There are sounds and colors and propor- 
tions felt to be beautiful by us, but which may not be appre- 
ciated by other intelligences, and which are so relished by us, 
simply because of the peculiarities of our human organization 
and constitution. I acknowledge that, when we follow these 
colors and sounds and proportions sufficiently far, we come in- 
variably to mathematical ratios and relations ; but we are now, 
be it observed, in the region of immutable truth. Other kinds 
of beauty, arising from the contemplation of happiness and feel- 
ing, land us in the moral good, which is also necessary and eter- 
nal. I have sometimes thought that beauty is a gorgeous robe 
spread over certain portions of the true and the good, to recom- 
mend them to our regards and cluster our affections round them. 
Our aesthetic emotions being thus roused, the association of 
ideas comes in merely as a secondary agent to prolong and in- 
tensify the feeling. 

The two volumes on the " Philosophy of the Active and 
Moral Powers " were published by Stewart immediately before 
his death. The leading ideas unfolded in them had been given, 
in an epitomized form, in the " Outlines," published many years 
before. They are somewhat too bulky for all the matter they 
contain, and they want somewhat of the freshness of his earlier 
works ; but they are characterized by profound wisdom, by a 
high moral tone, by a stately eloquence, and the felicitous ap- 
plication of general principles to the elucidation of practical 
points. He begins with the instinctive principles of action, 
which he classifies as appetites, desires, and affections. The 
arrangement is good in some respects, but is by no means 
exhaustive. As the next step in advance in this department of 
mental science, an attempt must be made to give a classifica- 
tion of man's motive principles, or of the ends by which man 
may be swayed in desire and action. Among these will fall to 
be placed, first of all pleasure and pain ; that is, man has a 
natural disposition to take to pleasure and avoid pain. But 
this is far from being the sole motive principle in man's 
mind. There are many others. There is, for example, the 
tendency of every native faculty to act, and this irrespective of 
pleasure or pain. Again, there are particular natural appeten- 
cies, which look to ends of their own, towards (to use the Ian- 



298 BUG ALB STEWART. [Art. xl. 

guage of Butler) particular external things of which the mind 
hath always a particular idea or perception, towards these things 
themselves, such as knowledge, power, fame, and this indepen- 
dent of the pleasure to be derived from them. Higher than 
all, and claiming to be higher, is the moral motive, or obligation 
to do right. A classification of these motive principles, even 
though only approximately correct, would serve most important 
purposes in philosophy generally, and more especially in ethics 
and all the social sciences. Very low and inadequate views 
have been taken of these motive principles of humanity, es- 
pecially by those who represent man as capable of being 
swayed only by the prospect of securing pleasure or avoid- 
ing pain. It should never be forgotten, that the emotive part 
of man's nature may be excited by a great many other objects 
as well as pleasure and pain, by all the objects, indeed, which 
are addressed to the motive principles of man. It is the ap- 
prehension of objects as about to gratify the motive principles 
of the mind — whatever they be — which stirs up the emotions. 
Thus, the apprehension of a coming object, which is to gratify 
a motive principle, excites hope, which is strong in proportion 
to the strength of the apprehension, and the strength of the 
particular motive principle ; while the apprehension of a coming 
object, which is to disappoint this motive principle, stirs up 
fear. It is strange that Stewart nowhere treats of the emo- 
tions in his " Philosophy of the Active Powers." 

Stewart's view of the moral power in man, and of moral good, 
seems to me to be substantially correct. In treating of these 
subjects, he avows his obligations to Butler and Price. His 
doctrine has been adopted, with some modifications, which are 
improvements, by Cousin. Stewart and Cousin are the most 
elevated of all the moralists who treat of ethics on grounds 
independent of the Word of God. I am convinced that they 
never could have given so pure a morality, had they not lived 
in the midst of light shed abroad on our earth by a super- 
natural religion. I have always felt it to be a strange circum- 
stance, that Stewart and Cousin, in giving so high a view of the 
moral faculty, are never led to acknowledge that it condemns 
the possessor ; and after presenting moral good in so rigid a 
form, are not constrained to acknowledge that the moral law 
has not been kept by man. Taking their own high principles 



Art. xl.] HIS ETHICAL VIEWS. 299 

along with them, neither could have looked within, without dis- 
covering sin to be quite as much a reality as virtue. Stewart 
could not have gone out of his dwelling in the old College or 
the Canongate, nor could Cousin have gone out of his cham- 
bers in the Sorbonne, without being obliged to observe how far 
man and woman have fallen beneath the ideal picture which 
they have drawn in their lectures. At the very time when the 
Scottish metaphysicians were discoursing so beautifully of 
moral virtue, there was a population springing up around their 
very colleges in Edinburgh and Glasgow, sunk in vice and 
degradation, which appalled the good men of the next age — 
the age of Chalmers — to contemplate, which the men of this 
age know not how to grapple with, and which is not to be ar- 
rested by any remedy which the mere philosophic moralists 
have propounded. I acknowledge most fully, that Stewart's 
lectures and writings have tended, directly or indirectly, to 
carry several important measures which are calculated to ele- 
vate the condition of mankind, such as reform in the legis- 
lature, prison improvement, and the abolition of tests and 
of restrictions on commerce. But the institutions which aim 
at lessening the sin and misery of the outcast and degraded — 
such as missions, ragged schools, and reformatories, — have 
proceeded from very different influences ; and a philosophy 
embracing the facts which they contemplate, must dive deeper 
into human nature, and probe its actual condition more faith- 
fully, than the academic moralists of Scotland ever ventured 
to do. 

It is very evident that the Scottish academic metaphysicians 
of last century, while they pay a dignified respect to Chris- 
tianity, have not identified themselves with its profound pecul- 
iarities. Without meaning to excuse this deficiency, I may 
yet affirm that some incidental advantages have sprung from 
this reticence. It was certainly better that they should have 
kept at a respectful distance from Christianity, than that they 
should have approached it only, like the great German meta- 
physical systems, to set all its truths in rigid philosophic frame- 
work, or to absorb them all within themselves, as by a devour- 
ing flame. But the peculiar advantage arising from their 
method consists in this, that they have, by induction, estab- 
lished a body of ethical truth on grounds independent of re- 



300 DUGALD STEWART. [Art. xl. 

vealed religion ; and this can now be appealed to in all defences 
of Christianity, and as an evidence of the need of something 
which philosophy is incompetent to supply. Divines can now 
found on those great truths which the Scottish philosophers 
have established, as to there being a distinct moral faculty and 
an immutable moral law, and then press on those whose con- 
science tells them that they have broken that law, to embrace 
the provision which revelation has made to meet the wants of 
humanity. 

The space which I have occupied with the " Mental and Moral 
Philosophy" precludes me from entering on the two volumes of 
" Political Economy," published partly from manuscripts left 
by Stewart himself, and partly from notes by pupils. The 
views expounded will scarcely be regarded as much advancing 
the science in the present day ; but they did good service when 
delivered for twenty years in lectures. They are still worthy 
of being looked at on special topics ; they may form an inter- 
esting chapter in the history of the literature of political econ- 
omy, and they illustrate the character of Stewart's intellect and 
philosophy. 

An estimate of the influence which has been exercised by 
Stewart may form an appropriate close to this article. 

In Scotland, he increased the reputation of the Edinburgh 
University. Horner speaks of " many young Englishmen who 
had come to Edinburgh to finish their education," and not a 
few of these had been attracted by Stewart. He has had a 
greater influence than perhaps any other, in diffusing through- 
out Scotland a taste for mental and moral science. I have 
referred to the power exercised on him by Reid ; but, if Stewart 
owed much to Reid, Reid owed nearly as much to his grateful 
pupil, who finished and adorned the work of his master, and by 
his classical taste has recommended the common-sense philos- 
ophy to many who would have turned away with disdain from 
the simpler manner of Reid. And here I am tempted to give 
utterance to the feeling, that Reid has been peculiarly fortunate 
in those who have attached themselves to his school. If 
Stewart helped to introduce Reid to polite society, Sir William 
Hamilton, by his unmatched logic and vast erudition, has com- 
pelled philosophers to give him — notwithstanding the some- 
what untechnical character of his writings — a place in their 



Art. xl.] HIS INFLUENCE IN ENGLAND. 301 

privileged circle. By his expositions of Reid, and his own in- 
dependent labors, Mr. Stewart aided in throwing back a tide 
of scepticism : — which had appeared in France in the previous 
century ; in England toward the beginning of the eighteenth 
century, on the back of the licentious reigns of Charles II. and 
James II. ; and, in Scotland, about the middle of that century. 
This tide came to a height about the time of the French Rev- 
olution, and it was one of the avowed aims of Stewart, " to stem 
the inundation of sceptical, or rather atheistical, publications 
which were imported from the Continent." Nor is it to be 
forgotten, that Stewart, directly by his lectures and indirectly 
by his pupils, contributed as much as any man of his age, to 
diffuse throughout Scotland a taste for elegant literature, and 
enlarged and liberal opinions in politics. 

As to England, Sir J. Mackintosh, writing to Stewart in 
1802, speaks of the want of any thing which he could call purely 
philosophical thinking; and Horner, in 1 804, declares, that the 
highest names in the estimation of those in the metropolis, 
who felt any interest in speculative pursuits, were Hobbes and 
Hartley. Such works as the " Moral Philosophy " of Paley, were 
fitted to lower still farther, rather than elevate, this taste. It 
was altogether, then, for the benefit of English thought, that 
Stewart did become gradually known in South Britain, where 
his elegant style, his crowning good sense, and the moderation 
of his opinions, recommended him to many who had imbibed as 
great an aversion to Scotch metaphysics as ever George III. had. 
There are still Englishmen who abhor the infidelity of Hume, 
and who despise the plainness of Reid, who suspect the rhet- 
oric of Brown, and are frightened by the bristling nomenclature 
and logical distinctions of Hamilton, but who are attracted by 
the writings of Stewart, which are felt to be as pleasing and 
as regular as their own rich fields bounded by hedge-rows. In 
England he has so far been of use in creating a philosophical 
spirit, where none existed before, and in checking the utilita- 
rianism of Paley. He is also entitled to a share of the credit 
of the great measures of reform, which such pupils as Horner, 
Brougham, Lord John Russell, Palmerston, Jeffrey, and Lans- 
downe carried in Parliament. Perhaps these eminent men 
have never estimated the amount of wholesome impulse which 
they received in early life from the prelections and lofty char- 
acter of the Edinburgh professor. 



302 DUGALD STEWART. [Art. xl. 

In France the influence of Reid and Stewart has been con- 
siderable, and has been of the most beneficial character. In 
that country, Locke's philosophy, unfortunately introduced by 
Voltaire and accepted in its worst side, had wrought only mis- 
chief, partly by its drawing away the attention of thinkers from 
the more spiritual philosophy of Descartes, and partly by its 
tempting a set of speculators to derive all men's ideas from 
sensation, and to deny the existence of all ideas which could 
not be derived from this source, — such as the idea of moral 
good, of infinity, and of God. This wretched philosophy — if 
philosophy it can be called — was one of the fatal powers which 
operated to give an evil issue to the Revolution, and prevented 
good from coming out of it. After -sensationalism — which 
used, but only to abuse, the name of Locke — had reigned for 
more than half a century, there appeared a reaction led on by 
M. Royer Collard, who began in 1811 to lecture at the Normal 
School. It is a most interesting circumstance, that, in con- 
ducting this war against the debasing systems which prevailed, 
he betook himself to the philosophy of Reid and Stewart. Ex- 
ercising a considerable influence in himself, Royer Collard has 
had a more extended sway through his pupils, especially Victor 
Cousin and Theodore Jouffroy. In the course of years, the 
works of Reid were translated into French, with an admirable 
historical and critical introduction, by Jouffroy. So early as 
1 808/ the first volume of Stewart's " Elements " was translated 
into French by M. Prevost of Geneva ; and, at a later date, 
M. Peisse, has translated the other two volumes of the same 
work. Stewart's " Outlines " were translated into the same 
tongue by Jouffroy, who has prefixed a preface of great judg- 
ment and acuteness. It thus appears, that the great reaction 
in favor of sound philosophy, commenced by Royer Collard 
and conducted by Cousin and Jouffroy, has made large and 
profitable use of the Scottish school, and rejoices to acknowl- 
edge its obligations to Scotland. No doubt, it has also called 
in aid from other quarters. Cousin has been indebted to the 
school of Kant, as well as to the school of Reid, and has de- 
rived some of his favorite principles immediately from the 
great metaphysician of his own country, Descartes ; and he 
has besides carefully examined the human mind, in an induc- 
tive manner ; and he has been able to give a unity to these 



Art. xl.] RELATION TO COUSIN AND KANT. 303 

materials, because he is possessed of great original genius, 
acuteness, and comprehensiveness of mind. I am sometimes 
inclined to think, however, that he has got the most precious 
element in his eclectic system from the school of Scotland. I 
have been greatly gratified to observe, that, after he had been 
drawn aside for a time from his attachment to the Scottish 
philosophy, by a later affection for German transcendentalism 
(this is very visible in his course of lectures delivered in 1828 
and 1829), he returned in his later years to his first love, — 
and this at a time when Scotland was rather forsaking the 
inductive method, and turning its regards towards the a 
priori method of Germany. 

I feel proud, I confess, of the eulogiums which have been 
pronounced on Scotland, not only by Cousin, but by Jouffroy 
and Remusat. But these philosophers have scarcely seen, after 
all, wherein lies the peculiar strength of the Scottish nation. 
This is not to be found in its systems of moral philosophy, but 
in its religion, of which the high moral tone of its philosophy 
is but a reflection, which would soon wax dim and vanish were 
the original light extinguished ; — nay, in remembering that 
Kant was descended from Scottish parentage, I have some- 
times thought that his high moral precepts may be also a re- 
flection from the same light. Often, I should think, when 
M. Cousin looked around him on these scenes of revolution 
through which France has passed, must he have seen that his 
country needs something deeper and more influential than any 
system of moral science, even though it should be as pure and 
elevated as that which he inculcated. 

In Germany Stewart has been little known, and has exer- 
cised no power for good or for evil. The only English philos- 
opher familiarly referred to in that country is Locke, and even 
he is known, I suspect, more through his French consequences 
than from the study of his work. The German professors 
speak of him, under the name of Locke, as the representative 
of sensationalism, overlooking the constant reference which he 
makes to reflection as a separate source of ideas, and to the 
lengthened account which he gives of intuition, — a much juster 
account, in some respects, of its function than that given by 
Kant or Schelling. The great English ethical writer, Butler, 
who has established for ever the great truth of the supremacy 



304 DUGALD STEWART. [Art. xl. 

of conscience in the human constitution, is either altogether 
unknown in Germany, or referred to by such writers as Tho- 
luck only to show that he is not understood or appreciated. 
The only Scottish metaphysician thoroughly known in Germany 
is David Hume. Reid is occasionally spoken of, only to be 
disparaged in his system and its results. Stewart is scarcely 
ever named. I must be allowed to regret this. Such a body 
of carefully inducted fundamental truth as we have in the 
philosophy of Reid and Stewart is precisely what was and is 
needed to preserve thought from the extravagances of the 
transcendental schools in the last age, and now, in the natural 
recoil which has taken place, since 1 848, from the tide of materi- 
alism which is setting in so strongly, and with no means or 
method of meeting it. The philosophy of Germany must ever 
go by oscillations, by actions and reactions, till the critical 
method of Kant is abandoned, and the inductive method is 
used to determine the rule and law of those a priori principles 
of which so much use is made, while there has been so little 
careful inquiry into their precise nature and mode of operation. 
This may be the proper place for referring to the relation in 
which Stewart stood toward Kant. I have already expressed 
my regret that Stewart should have entered on a criticism of 
Kant without a deeper acquaintance with his system. No 
doubt it might be retorted, that the criticisms of Stewart upon 
Kant are not more ignorant and foolish than those of the disci- 
ples of Kant upon Reid ; but it is better to admit that Stewart 
committed a blunder in his review of the Kantian system. 
Some have supposed that, if he had known more of Kant, he 
would have formed a totally different opinion of his philosophy. 
And I admit that a further acquaintance with Kant's works 
would have raised Kant in his estimation ; would have kept him 
from describing his nomenclature as "jargon," and his philos- 
ophy as " incomprehensible," from affirming that Kant has 
" thrown no new light on the laws of the intellectual world ; " 
would have shown him many curious points of correspondence 
between the views of Kant and the profoundest of his own 
doctrines, and have enabled him, when he did depart from 
Kant, to give fair and valid reasons, and thus to help in what 
must be one of the tasks of philosophy in this age, — the work 
of taking from Kant what is good and true, and casting away 



Art. xl.] THE WORK DONE BY HIM". 305 

what is evil, because false. While I admit all this, I am con- 
vinced at the same time that Stewart would never have given 
an adhesion to the peculiarities of Kantism. He would have 
said, " My method of induction is better than your method of crit- 
icism, and my account of the intuitive convictions of the mind is 
correct when I represent them as fundamental laws of thought 
and belief ; whereas you are giving a wrong account of them 
when you represent them as a priori forms imposing on the ob- 
jects in all cognition something which is not in the objects." I 
cannot conceive him, in any circumstances, allowing to Kant (as 
Hamilton unfortunately did) that space and time and causation 
are laws of thought and not of things, and may have merely a 
subjective existence. His caution, his good sense, and his 
careful observation, would have prevented him from ever falling 
into a system of nescience such as that to which the relentless 
logic of Hamilton has carried him, founding, I acknowledge, 
on premises which Stewart as well as Kant had furnished. 
He would have adhered, after knowing all, to his decision : 
"We are irresistibly led to ascribe to the thing itself (space) an 
existence independent of the will of any being." It is an " in- 
comprehensible doctrine which denies the objective reality of 
time." " That space is neither a substance, nor an accident, nor 
a relation, may be safely granted ; but it does not follow from 
this that it is nothing objective." " Our first idea of space or 
extension seems to be formed by abstracting this attribute from 
the other qualities of matter. The idea of space, however, in 
whatever manner formed, is manifestly accompanied with an 
irresistible conviction that space is necessarily existent, and 
that its annihilation is impossible," etc. He adds, " To call 
this proposition in question, is to open a door to universal 
scepticism." (" Diss.," pp. 596, 597.) 

The great work which the school of Reid has done consists 
in its careful investigation, in the inductive manner first, of the 
faculties of the mind ; and, secondly, and more particularly, of 
man's primary and intuitive convictions. For this they ought 
to be honored in all time. Kant did a work similar to this last, 
but in a different manner. Rejecting (as Reid had done) the 
combined dogmatic and deductive method of Descartes, he 
introduced the critical method, affirming that reason can crit- 
icise itself, and proceeding to criticise reason by a kind of 



2>o6 DUGALD STEWART. [Art. xl. 

logical process of a most unsatisfactory kind. Criticism has suc- 
ceeded criticism, each new critic taking a new standing-point, 
or advancing a step farther, till Hegel's system became the 
reductio ad absurdum of the whole method of procedure inau- 
gurated by Kant. I admit that Kant was right in affirming that 
a priori principles should be examined before they are assumed 
in philosophical investigation. We are not at liberty to assume 
a first truth till we have shown it to be a first truth ; and we 
have no right to use it in argument or deduction till we have 
determined its precise nature and law ; but this is to be done, 
I maintain, in the inductive manner, with its accompanying 
analysis and exclusions. The Scottish school commenced this 
work, but they do not profess to have completed it. Stewart 
everywhere proclaims that it is to be done by the combined 
efforts of successive inquirers, pursuing the same method for 
ages. 

Reid and Stewart nowhere profess to give a full list, or even 
a rigid classification, of the intuitive convictions of the mind. 
All that they affirm is, that those principles which they have 
seized for the purpose of meeting the scepticism of Hume, are 
and must be intuitive. They do not even pretend to give a 
full account of these, or to express them in their ultimate form. 
They vacillate in the account which they give of them, and in 
the nomenclature which they employ to denote them. They 
draw no definite distinction between cognitions, beliefs, and 
judgments. They treat of the faculties, and also of the prin- 
ciples of common sense, but they do not tell us how the two 
stand related to each other. And here I may be permitted to 
observe, that I look on these fundamental laws as being the 
necessary laws of the faculties regulating all their exercises, 
but not as laws or principles before the consciousness ; and 
they are to be reflexly discovered as general laws only by the 
induction of their individual acts. Reid and Stewart do not 
even tell us what are the tests by which their presence may 
be detected : these I hold to be, first, as Aristotle and Locke 
have shown, self-evidence ; and, second, as Leibnitz and Kant 
have shown, necessity and universality. Such defects as these 
they were quite willing to confess in that spirit of modesty 
which was one of their highest characteristics ; and to any one 
complaining that they had not settled every point, they would, 



Art. xli.] WILLIAM LAWRENCE BROWN. 307 

as it were, say, Go on in the path which we have opened ; we 
are sure that there is more truth yet to be discovered, and 
rejoice we must and will if you succeed where we have failed 
and raise a little higher that fabric of which we have laid the 
foundation. 



XLI. — WILLIAM LA WRENCE BRO WN. 

In 1785, Mr. Burnett, a merchant in Aberdeen, bequeathed certain sums 
to be expended at intervals of forty years in the shape of two premiums for 
the best works furnishing "evidence that there is a Being, all powerful, 
wise, and good, by whom every thing exists : and particularly to obviate 
difficulties regarding the wisdom and goodness of the Deity ; and this, in 
the first place, from considerations independent of written revelation, and. 
in the second place, from the revelation of the Lord Jesus, and from the 
whole to point out inferences most necessary for and useful to mankind." 
This endowment has not called forth any one great work ; but, on each of 
the two occasions on which it has been competed for, it has been the means 
of publishing two excellent treatises. On the first competition, the first prize 
was awarded to Principal Brown of Aberdeen, and the second to the Rev. 
John Bird Sumner, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. 

Dr. Brown was born at Utrecht, 1755, an d became minister of the Scotch 
church there. He removed to Scotland in 1795, became professor of divin- 
ity in Aberdeen, and afterwards principal of Marischal College. He lived 
till 1830. When in Holland he wrote an "Essay on the Folly of Scepti- 
cism. 1 ' His Burnett Prize Essay, " On the Existence of a Supreme 
Creator," was given to the world in 18 16. The work did not produce much 
impression in its own age, and is now all but forgotten. People wonder 
that so large a sum (upwards of ,£1,200) did not call forth a more brilliant 
production ; but the truth is, that money cannot produce an original work, 
which can come only from the spontaneous, thoughts of the man of genius, 
that prize essays are commonly respectably good and nothing more, and, 
while they may serve a good purpose in their own day, are seldom valued 
as a legacy by posterity. The book is in many respects the perfection of a 
prize essay. It conforms rigidly to the conditions imposed by the donor ; 
it is supremely judicious ; it did not startle the judges by any eccentricity or 
even novelty, and certainly not by any profundity ; and altogether is a clear 
and able defence of natural and revealed religion. It interests us to notice 
that the principles of the Scottish philosophy are here employed to support 
the great truths relating to the being of God and the destiny of man. 



308 ARCHIBALD ALISON. [Art. xlii. 



XLIL-— ARCHIBALD ALISON. 

He was born in Edinburgh in 1757, studied at Glasgow Uni- 
versity, went thence to Oxford, where he matriculated in Baliol 
College. Taking orders in the Church of England in 1784, he 
received several preferments ; such as, a prebendal stall in Salis- 
bury, and the perpetual curacy of Kenley in Shropshire. He 
married a daughter of John Gregory, and thus became more 
closely identified with Edinburgh, where he continued usually 
to reside, and where he discharged the duties of an Episcopal 
clergyman in the Cowgate chapel from the year 1800 down 
to the time of his death in 1839. He was distinguished for 
his excessive politeness. He published a volume of sermons, 
which had the good fortune (or the bad, for the " Edinburgh " 
had never a great reputation as a critic of sermons) to get a 
laudatory notice in the Edinburgh Review, where they were 
compared to the " Oraisons Funebres " of Bossuet, and it was 
said of them : " We do not know any sermons so pleasing or 
so likely to be popular, and do good to those who are pleased 
with them. All the feelings are generous and gentle, all the 
sentiments liberal, and all the general views just and enno- 
bling." But the work which lives is " Essays on the Nature 
and Principles of Taste," which was published in 1790, but 
seems to have passed very much out of sight till the booksellers 
in 1 8 10 told him that there was a wish expressed for the second 
edition, which was reviewed by Francis Jeffrey in 181 1, and 
afterwards had an extensive circulation in various countries. 

The arrangement and manner of the work are admirable. 
The style is distinguished by infinite grace, and is worthy of 
being compared to that of Addison : — indeed I am not sure if 
we have a more beautiful specimen of the last-century manner 
of composition, moulded on the " Spectator," on the French 
classics, and the wits of Queen Anne. Every word is appro- 
priate, and is in its appropriate place ; and the sentences glide 
along like a silvery stream. The descriptions of natural scenery, 
which are very numerous, are singularly felicitous and graceful : 
that word graceful ever comes up when we would describe his 
manner. He does not seem to have had an equal opportunity 



Art. xlii.] TASTE, A COMPLEX EMOTION. 309 

of studying beauty in the fine arts, in architecture, statuary, 
and painting, though the allusions to the universally known 
models of these are always appreciative and discriminating. 

Drawing a distinction, very essential in all such inquiries, he 
would investigate, first, the nature of those qualities that pro- 
duce the emotions of taste, and then that faculty by which the 
emotions are received. This distinction, clearly announced, is 
not thoroughly carried out. In the body of the work, in in- 
quiring into the faculty raising the emotions, he makes the 
remark, that they are not " the objects of immediate observa- 
tion," and that they are often obscured under the number of 
qualities with which they are accidentally combined. He does 
not seem to have expounded his views as to the faculty. He 
opposes the theories which have uniformly taken for granted 
the simplicity of the emotion, and especially those which have 
made it a sense or senses. He endeavors to show that it has 
no resemblance to a sense, and that it is finally to be resolved 
into the more general principles of our constitution. He shows 
that " it is not, in fact, a simple but a complex emotion : that 
it involves in all cases, first, the production of some simple 
emotion or the exercise of some moral affection ; and, secondly, 
the consequent excitement of a peculiar exercise of the imagi- 
nation ; that these concomitant effects are distinguishable and 
very often distinguished in our experience ; and that the pecul- 
iar pleasure of the beautiful or sublime is only felt when these 
two effects are conjoined, and the complex emotions produced." 

In entering on his " Analysis," he proceeds on the philosophic 
principle, that we should consider the effects before we proceed 
to determine the cause. So he is to begin with considering 
the effect produced on the mind when the emotions of beauty 
or sublimity are felt, and then go on to investigate the causes 
which are productive of it, or, in other words, the sources of the 
beautiful and sublime in nature. 

I. "When any object either of sublimity or beauty is pre- 
sented to the mind, I believe man is conscious of a train of 
thought being immediately awakened in his imagination anal- 
ogous to the character or expression of the original object. The 
simple perception of the object, we frequently find, is insuf- 
ficient to excite these emotions, unless it is accompanied with 
this operation of mind ; unless, according to common expression, 



310 ARCHIBALD ALISON. [Art. xlii. 

our imagination is seized and our fancy busied in the pursuit 
of all those trains of thought which are allied to this character 
or expression. Thus, when we feel either the beauty or sub- 
limity of natural scenery, the gay lustre of a morning in spring, 
or the mild radiance of a summer evening, the savage majesty 
of a wintry storm, or the wild magnificence of a tempestuous 
ocean, — we are conscious of a variety of images in our minds 
very different from those which the objects themselves can 
present to the eye. Trains of pleasing or of solemn thought 
arise spontaneously within our minds : our hearts swell with 
emotions of which the objects before us afford no adequate 
cause." The state of mind most favorable to the emotions of 
taste is one in which the imagination is free and unembarrassed ; 
and the feeling is not interfered with by any thing which inter- 
rupts the flow, is not interfered with in particular by the intru- 
sion of criticism. He shows that the exercise of imagination 
and the feeling of beauty is increased by association, especially 
that of resemblance, and enters upon the field which had been 
so cultivated by Beattie. He remarks very truly how an ac- 
quaintance with poetry in our earlier years has a powerful 
influence in increasing our sensibility to the beauties of nature. 
He then gives an analysis of the peculiar exercise of the 
imagination. There is, in all cases, the indulgence of a train 
of thought. But then, every train of thought does not raise 
emotions of beauty ; and so he investigates the nature of those 
trains of thought that are produced by object , of sublimity and 
beauty, and their difference from those ordinary trains which 
are unaccompanied with such pleasure. This difference con- 
sists in two things : first, in the nature of the ideas or concep- 
tions which compose such trains ; and, secondly, in the nature 
of the law of their succession. Some ideas are fitted to raise 
emotions : these he calls " ideas of emotions ; " and the train of 
thought which produces beauty is in all cases composed of ideas 
capable of exciting some affection or emotion." Thus, the 
ideas suggested by the scenery of spring are ideas productive 
of emotions of cheerfulness, of gladness, and of tenderness. 
The images suggested by the prospect of ruins are images 
belonging to pity, to melancholy, to admiration. The ideas in 
the same manner awakened by the view of the ocean in a storm 
are ideas of power, of majesty, and of terror. But farther the 



Art. xlii.] BEAUTY IN MATERIAL WORLD. 311 

ideas themselves must have some general principle of connec- 
tion, subsisting through the whole extent of the train, giving 
them a certain and definite character, and a conformity to that 
peculiar emotion which first excited them. It appears, that " in 
every operation of taste, there are thus two different faculties 
employed ; viz., some affection or emotion raised, and the imagi- 
nation excited to a train of thought corresponding to this 
emotion. The peculiar pleasure which attends and which con- 
stitutes the emotions of taste, may naturally be considered as 
composed of the pleasures which separately attend the exercise 
of those faculties, or, in other words, as produced by the union 
of pleasing emotion with the pleasure which by the constitu- 
tion of our nature is annexed to the exercise of the imagination." 
Our consciousness testifies that there is truth and very impor- 
tant truth in all this. Every form of beauty in nature and art, 
music for instance, raises a train of ideas which are accom- 
panied with emotions all of a certain kind. While he has 
brought before us a body of facts, it may be doubted whether 
he has seen himself, or exposed to the view of others, the whole 
of the mental phenomena. The question arises, What starts the 
train ? and a farther question follows, What gives the unity and 
harmony to the train ? An answer to these questions, or rather 
to this question, — for the questions are one, — may disclose 
to our view an objective beauty and sublimity very much over- 
looked by Alison, and the supporters of the association theory. 
II. It is proper to state that Alison does speak in the second 
and longest essay of the beauty and sublimity of the material 
world. He treats of the beauty of sound, color, form, motion, 
and of the human countenance and form. He says matter 
in itself is unfitted to produce any kind of emotion, and can 
raise an emotion of beauty only by an association with other 
qualities, and " as being either the signs or expressions of such 
qualities as are fitted by the constitution of our nature to pro- 
duce emotion." To those who consider sounds simply as 
sounds they have no beauty. There is surely an oversight 
here : for music has in itself a beauty which can be mathemat- 
ically expressed ; but then the feeling of beauty is prolonged 
and intensified by the train of emotional ideas which is set a 
going. Alison traces the associations raised by sounds. The 
sublimity of thunder is founded on awe and some degree of 



312 ARCHIBALD ALISON. [Art. xlii. 

terror. Sounds are no longer sublime when they do not 
awaken such feelings. " There is nothing more common than 
for people who are afraid of thunder to mistake some very com- 
mon and indifferent sound for it ; as, the rumbling of a cart, or 
the rattling of a carriage. While their mistake continues, they 
feel the sound as sublime : the moment they are undeceived, 
they are the first to laugh at their terror and to ridicule the 
sound which occasioned it. Children, at first, are as much 
alarmed at the thunder of the stage as at real thunder. When- 
ever they find that it is only a deception, they amuse them- 
selves by mimicking it." He represents the real power of 
music as consisting in its imitation of those signs of emotion 
or passion which take place in the human voice. 

In respect of colors, he holds that they are not beautiful, 
except as " expressive to us of pleasing or interesting qualities." 
He is successful in showing that there is a beauty of color 
arising from association of color, as in dress for instance : but 
science announces that there is a harmony of colors, as of com- 
plementary colors, that is, of colors making up the white beam, 
which is beautiful physiologically. He maintains that " the 
beauty of forms arises altogether from the associations we con- 
nect with them," or the qualities of which they are expressive 
to us. Sublimity of forms arises from their suggesting ideas 
of danger or power, or from their magnitude. Among natural 
objects, angular forms are associated with hardness, strength, 
or durability, suggesting force ; and winding forms, with free- 
will, fineness, delicacy, ease. He labors to prove that propor- 
tion, as in architecture, is felt to be beautiful, because expressive 
of fitness. Esthetic science maintains in opposition that there 
are certain proportions in length and composition which to our 
eye have a beauty in themselves. As to motion, it is felt to be 
beautiful, because associated with power. Rapid motion in a 
straight line is simply expressive of great power. Slow motion 
in curves is expressive of gentle power, united with ease, free- 
dom, and playfulness. 

He dwells at length on the different sources of the beauty 
or sublimity of the countenance of man. It arises, first, from 
physical beauty, or the beauty of certain colors and forms con- 
sidered simply as forms or colors ; secondly, from the beauty of 
expression and character, or that habitual form of features and 



Akt. xlii.] CRITICISM OF HIS THEORY. 313 

color of complexion which, from experience, we consider as sig- 
nificant of those habitual dispositions of the human mind which 
we love or approve or admire ; thirdly, from the beauty of emo- 
tion, or the expression of certain local or temporary affections 
of mind which we approve or love or admire. Each of these 
species of beauty will be perfect when the composition of the 
countenance is such as to preserve, pure and unmingled, the 
expression which it predominantly conveys ; and when no feat- 
ure or color is admitted but which is subservient to the unity 
of this expression. The last or highest degree of beauty or 
sublimity of the human countenance will alone be attained 
when all these expressions are united : when the physical 
beauty corresponds to the characteristic ; when the beauty of 
temporary emotion harmonizes with the beauty of character ; 
and when all fall upon the heart of the spectator as one whole, 
in which matter, in all its most exquisite forms, is only felt as 
the sign of one great or amiable character of mind." 

In criticising this theory, I am prepared to admit that the 
ingenious author has seized and unfolded to our view a large 
body of truth which had never been so fully developed before. 
He is surely right in saying that there is a train of ideas in all 
those operations of mind in which we contemplate what is called 
beautiful and sublime : it is so, as we listen to music, grave or 
gay ; as we gaze at a waterfall, or into the starry vault of heaven. 
It is also certain that all these ideas are emotional : that is, ac- 
companied with emotion ; and that the ideas and emotions are 
all of a connected kind, and thus produce the one effect. On 
these points his views seem to me to be just, and they are to 
a great extent original. It should farther be allowed that in 
all this there is the influence of association of ideas, regulated 
by such principles as contiguity and resemblance : this had 
been shown fully before his time by Hutcheson, by Beattie, 
and others of the Scottish school. But is this all ? It seems 
as if we needed, besides, both a start to the movement and a 
principle of connection to make it proceed in one direction. In 
music there are sounds which produce a pleasant sensation : 
these are regulated, as has been known since the time of Pyth- 
agoras, by mathematical relations. This pleasant sensation 
gives the impulse to the train of emotional thought, it sustains it, 
and gives to it a congruity. Again, it has been shown that there 



314 ARCHIBALD ALISON. [Art. xlii. 

are melodious and harmonious colors, which are pleasing to the 
eye ; and these set out the mind on a pleasant train of associa- 
tion, and keep it on the one tract. Attempts have been made, 
since the days of Plato, to discover forms which are essentially 
beautiful ; and these have so far been successful. There are 
proportions and there are curves which are adapted to the laws 
of light on the one hand, and to our sensory organs on the 
other. Are not these the roots from which our associated ideas 
and emotions spring? Are not the objects possessing them 
entitled to be called beautiful and sublime ? 

While there is a beauty of sound, color, and form to act as 
the root of the feeling, it is to be allowed to Alison that there is 
a train of ideas and feelings which constitutes, as it were, the 
growing trunk. But, as Alison has shown, it is not every train 
of idea, nor even every train of emotional idea, that is fitted to 
raise emotions which are beautiful or sublime. There is need 
of a bond of connection to raise the proper kind of ideas, and 
to make them flow in one direction, so as to produce a uniform 
result. The objective sound, color, form, proportion, expression, 
must not only start the association, but must so far guide it 
along a consistent line ; make the ideas and feelings, for in- 
stance, which are raised as we stand gazing on a lovely coun- 
tenance or a lofty waterfall, all to be of a sort and to contribute 
to one emotional result. 

There are two grand oversights in the explanations of Alison : 
he overlooks the moving power which starts the train, and the 
guiding rails which direct it. This leaves a very great gap 
in his theory : he has no objective ground for beauty ; and this 
has set against it both artists and scientific investigators, who 
are apt to turn away from it with unbelief or with scorn, saying 
that they are not to be taken in by this illusory picture, for they 
are sure that beauty is a reality in the thing itself. It is the 
business of science, by its own methods, to investigate the pre- 
cise objective nature of sounds, colors, and forms ; and there is 
ground for believing that the laws involved will at last be enun- 
ciated in mathematical expressions. 

But there is a higher element than all this in beauty ; an ele- 
ment seen by Plato and by those who have so far caught his 
spirit, — such as, Augustine, Cousin, Mac Vicar, and Ruskin, — 
but commonly overlooked by men of science and the upholders 



Art. xlii.] BEAUTY, THE EXPRESSION OF MIND. 315 

of the association theory. The mere sensations or perceptions 
called forth by the presence of harmonious sounds, colors, and 
proportional forms, is not the main ingredient in the lovely and 
the grand. Beauty, after all, lies essentially in the ideas evoked. 
I hold by an association theory on this subject. But the ideas 
entitled to be called aesthetic should be of mind, and the higher 
forms of mind, intellectual and moral. There was, therefore, 
grand truth in the speculation of Plato, that beauty consists 
in the bounding of the waste, in the formation of order 
out of chaos ; or, in other words, in harmony and proportion. 
There was truth in the theory of Augustine, that beauty con- 
sists in order and design ; and in that of Hutcheson, that it 
consists in unity with variety. Alison had, at times, a glimpse 
of this truth, but then lost sight of it. He speaks with favor of 
the doctrine held by Reid, that matter is not beautiful in itself, 
but derives its beauty from the expression of mind ; he holds 
it true, so far as the qualities of matter are immediate signs of 
the powers or capacities of mind, and in so far as they are 
signs of those affections or dispositions of mind which we love, 
or with which we are formed to sympathize. He thus sums 
up his views : " The conclusion, therefore, in which I wish to 
rest is, that the beauty and sublimity which is felt in the vari- 
ous appearances of matter are finally to be ascribed to their 
expression of mind ; or to their being, either directly or in- 
directly, the signs of those qualities of mind, which are fitted, 
by the constitution of our nature, to affect us with pleasing or 
interesting emotion." There is a singular mixture of truth 
and error in this statement : truth, in tracing all beauty and 
sublimity to the expression of mind ; but error, in placing it in 
qualities which raise emotion according to our constitution. 
Beauty and sublimity are not the same as the true and the 
good ; but they are the expression and the signs of the true 
and the good, suggested by the objects that evidently partici- 
pate in them. 



3*6 GEORGE JARDINE. [Art. xliii. 



XLIIL — GEORGE JARDINE. 

All throughout the seventeenth century, there was a strong reaction in 
Great Britain against Aristotle, scholasticism, and formal logic generally. 
College youths everywhere were protesting against the syllogism, moods 
and figures, and reduction. Unfortunately, logic — in Glasgow, Edinburgh, 
and Saint Andrews, — came in the second year of the college course ; and 
youths of fifteen or sixteen groaned under the yoke, and longed for some- 
thing more fascinating and less arduous. The professor who did most 
to gratify this taste was Jardine, professor of logic and rhetoric in the 
university of Glasgow. 

For several sessions after his appointment, he followed the established 
method, giving the usual course of logic and metaphysics, though he says, 
" every day more and more convinced me that something was wrong in the 
system of instruction ; that the subjects on which I lectured were not 
adapted to the age, the capacity, and the previous attainments of my pupils." 
" To require the regular attendance of very young men two hours every 
day during a session of six or seven months, on lectures which they could 
not understand, and in which, of course, they could take no interest, had a 
direct tendency to produce habits of negligence, indifference, and inattention, 
which, it is well known, frequently terminate in a positive aversion to study of 
every description. The change from the animated perusal of the Greek and 
Roman classics to the unfathomable depths of logic and metaphysics was 
far too abrupt." The fault evidently lay, not in having logic as a required 
branch of study, and not in requiring it to be thoroughly learned, but in 
bringing it in too early in the course, and in not having in the second year 
a course on English literature and composition. Jardine did give a course 
of formal logic, but it was very much pressed into a corner. His text-book, 
" Quaedam ex Logical Compendiis Selects," is a meagre abridgment car- 
rying the student among the bones of the study, without clothing them 
with life, and fitted to leave the impression that the branch is as useless 
as it is dry. He enlarged with much deeper interest on the human mind 
generally, and the various faculties : on language, on taste, on beauty, on 
criticism, — showing no originality or grasp of intellect, but furnishing a 
course of great utility to young students, and felt to be interesting and 
stimulating. 

His views were expounded in his " Outlines of Philosophical Education, 
illustrated by the Method of Teaching the Logic Class in the University of 
Glasgow. 1 ' The work is still worthy of being looked into by all who would 
study what the Germans call " Pedagogic." He points out the advantages 
of the lecturing system. " While listening to a discourse delivered with 
some degree of animation, the mind of the student is necessarily more 
awakened, and feels a more powerful demand made upon its energies, than 
when perusing a printed volume." "In a class-room, a sympathetic feel- 
ing pervades the whole ; the glow of zeal and an expression of curiosity 



Art. xliv.] THOMAS BROWN. 317 

are perceived in almost every countenance ; all the faculties of the mind 
are exerted ; and powers unused before are awakened into life and activity." 
Buthe insists that the lecturing be accompanied with regular examinations. 
The teacher " will not examine the class in any stated order, but occasionally 
call upon the same individual at two successive hours, or even twice in one 
hour ; and, as a check upon open negligence, he may sometimes select such 
as appear the least attentive, and thereby expose their idleness to their 
fellow-students." But the most important part of his work is that in which 
he explains his views as to themes for composition, recommending that 
some be presented as fitted to enable the student to form clear and accurate 
notions and to express his thoughts, others to give a power of analysis and 
classification, a third to exercise and strengthen the reasoning faculties, 
and a fourth to encourage processes of investigation. Under this fourth 
head, he suggests as a theme, " There was fine linen in Egypt in the time 
of Moses," and would have the student thence determine the state of Egypt 
as to government, science, and art. 

Professor Jardine was born at Wandal, in the upper ward of Lanark- 
shire, in 1742. He was educated at Glasgow College, and became a licen- 
tiate of the Church of Scotland. In 1771, he became tutor to two sons 
of Baron Mure, and travelled with them in France. On his return in 1773, 
he was an unsuccessful candidate for the chair of humanity in Glasgow ; 
but, in 1774, he was appointed assistant and successor to Mr. Clow, pro- 
fessor of logic and rhetoric. In 1824, he retired from the teaching of 
logic, and died in 1827. His pupils acknowledged their deep obligations 
to him in interesting them in study and imparting to them a power of writ- 
ing the English language. But certainly he did not advance the science 
of logic, or help to promote the study of it among young men. Francis 
Jeffrey, who was fond of expressing his gratitude to him, may be taken as 
the representative pupil produced by him, capable of thinking and express- 
ing himself clearly and ably on every subject, but not diving into the 
depths of any subject. It required all the ability and energy of Sir William 
Hamilton to bring back Scottish youths to the scientific study of logic. 



XLIV. — THOMAS BROWN} 

In regard to the younger years of Thomas Brown, it is enough 
to mention, that he was born at Kirkmabreck, in the stewartry 
of Kirkcudbright, in January, 1778; that his father, who was 
minister of that place, died soon after, when the family re- 
moved to Edinburgh ; that he there received the rudiments 

1 "Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Brown, M.D." (1825), by 
David Welsh. Shorter Memoir by same prefixed to Brown's "Lectures." 



318 THOMAS BROWN. [Art. xliv. 

of his education from his mother ; that, in his seventh year, 
he went to London, under the protection of a maternal uncle, 
and attended successively schools at Camberwell, Chiswick, 
and Kensington, down to the time of the death of his uncle, 
in 1792, when he returned to Edinburgh, to reside with his 
mother and sisters, and begin his collegiate course in the uni- 
versity. He is described as a precocious child, and we can 
believe it. He was precocious all his life, and in every thing. 
We have to regret that he did not take sufficient pains to 
secure that the flower which blossomed so beautifully should be 
followed by corresponding fruit. We can credit his biographer, 
when he tells us that he learned the alphabet at a single 
lesson ; but I suspect that there must have been the prompting 
of some theological friend preceding the reply which he gave, 
when he was only between four and five, to an inquiring lady, 
that he was seeking out the differences in the narratives of the 
evangelists. At school he was distinguished by the gentleness 
of his nature and the delicacy of his feelings ; by the quick- 
ness of his parts, and particularly by the readiness of his 
memory ; by his skill in recitation, and his love of miscel- 
laneous reading, especially of works of imagination. Nor is 
it to be forgotten that he also gave promise of his genius for 
poetry, by verses which one of his masters got published, per- 
haps unfortunately for the youth, in a magazine. He read with 
a pencil in his hand, with which he made marks ; and, in the 
end, he had no pleasure in reading a book which was not his 
own. He began his collegiate course in Edinburgh by the 
study of logic under Finlayson ; and having, in the summer of 
1793, paid a visit to Liverpool, Currie, the biographer of Burns, 
introduced him to the first volume of Stewart's " Elements." 
The following winter he attended Stewart's course of lectures, 
and had the courage to wait on the professor, so renowned for 
his academic dignity, and read to him observations on one of 
his theories. Mr. Stewart listened patiently, and then read to 
the youth a letter which he had received from M. Prevost of 
Geneva, containing the very same objections. This was fol- 
lowed by an invitation to the house of the professor, who, how- 
ever, declined on this, as he did on all other occasions, to enter 
into controversy. It is but justice to Stewart to say, that he 
continued to take a paternal interest in the progress of his 



Art. xliv.] REVIEW OF THE " ZOONOMIA." 319 

pupil, till the revolt of Brown against the whole school of Reid 
cooled their friendship, and loosened the bonds which con- 
nected them. In 1796 he is studying law, which, however, he 
soon abandoned for medicine, and attended the medical classes 
from 1798 till 1803. At college, he received instructions from 
such eminent professors as Stewart, Robison, Playfair, and 
Black, and was stimulated by intercourse with college friends, 
such as Erskine, Brougham, Reddie, Leyden, Horner, Jeffrey, 
and Sidney Smith, — all precocious and ambitious like himself, 
and who, in the "Academy of Sciences," debated on topics far 
beyond their years and their knowledge. 

It was when Brown was at college, that Erasmus Darwin's 
"Zoonomia" was published. The work is filled with prema- 
ture theories as to life and mind, and proceeds on the method, 
as Brown calls it, of " hypothetical reasoning," — a method, I 
may remark, carried still further, but with a more carefully ob- 
served body of facts to support it, by his illustrious grandson, 
Charles Darwin. Brown read it at the age of eighteen, was 
irritated by its materialistic tendency, and scribbles notes upon 
it ; these ripen into a volume by the time he is nineteen, and 
were published by the time he was twenty, — " Observations 
on the Zoonomia of Erasmus Darwin, M. D." Brown was an 
excellent physiologist for his day ; but both the original work 
and the reply proceed on principles now regarded as antiquated. 
But Brown's criticism is a remarkable example of intellectual 
precocity. In the midst of physiological discussions, most of 
the metaphysical ideas which he developed in future years are 
to be found here in the bud. He considers the phenomena of 
the mind as mental states, speaks of them as "feelings," de- 
lights to trace them in their succession, and so dwells much 
on suggestion, and approaches towards the theory of general 
notions, and the theory of causation, expounded in his subse- 
quent works. It should be added, that the book committed 
him prematurely to principles which he was indisposed to re- 
view in his riper years. It appears from a letter to Darwin, 
that, at the age of nineteen, he had a theory of mind which he 
is systematizing. 

Out of the " Academy of Sciences " arose, as is well known, 
the " Edinburgh Review," in the second number of which 
there was a review, by Brown, of Viller's " Philosophie de 



320 THOMAS BROWN. [Art. xliv. 

Kant." The article is characterized by acuteness, especially 
when it points out the inconsistency of Kant in admitting that 
matter has a reality, and yet denying this of space and time, 
in behoof of the existence of which we have the very same 
kind of evidence. But the whole review is a blunder, quite as 
much as the reviews of Byron and Wordsworth in the same 
periodical. He has no appreciation of the profundity of Kant's 
philosophy, and no anticipation of the effects which it was to 
produce, not only on German but on British thinking. Im- 
mersed as he was in medical studies, fond of French literature, 
and tending towards a French sensationalism, he did not relish 
a system which aimed at showing how much there is in the 
mind independent of outward impression. The effects likely 
to be producecd on one who had never read Kant, and who 
took his views of him from that article, are expressed by Dr. 
Currie : " I shall trouble myself no more with transcenden- 
talism ; I consider it a philosophical hallucination." It is a 
curious instance of retribution, that, in the succeeding age, 
Brown's philosophy declined before systems which have bor- 
rowed their main principles from the philosophy of Kant, and 
deal as largely with a priori " forms," " categories," and " ideas," 
as Brown did with " sensations," " suggestions," and " feelings." 
We feel less interest than he did himself in two volumes of 
poetry, which he published shortly after taking his medical 
degree in 1803. His next publication was a more important 
one. The chair of mathematics in Edinburgh was vacant, and 
Leslie was a candidate. The city ministers attached to the 
court party wished to reserve it for themselves, and urged that 
Leslie was incapacitated, inasmuch as he had expressed appro- 
bation of Hume's doctrine of causation. It was on this occa- 
sion that Brown wrote his " Inquiry into the Relation of Cause 
and Effect," — at first a comparatively small treatise, but swol- 
len, in the third edition (of 18 18), into a very ponderous one 
It is divided into four parts, — the first, on the import of the 
relation ; the second, on the sources of the illusion with re- 
spect to it ; the third, on the circumstances in which the belief 
arises ; and the fourth, a review of Hume's theory. The 
work is full of repetitions, and the style, though always clear, 
is often cumbrous, and wants that vivacity and eloquence 
which so distinguish his posthumous lectures. It is charac- 



Art. xliv.] ESSAY ON CAUSE AND EFFECT. 32 1 

terized by great ingenuity and power of analysis. He has dis- 
pelled for ever a large amount of confusion which had collected 
around the relation ; and, in particular, he has shown that there 
is no link coming between the cause and its effect. " The sub- 
stances that exist in a train of phenomena are still, and must 
always be, the whole constituents of the train." If the cause 
be A and the effect B, there is not a third thing x necessary 
in order to A being followed by B. He agrees with Hume, in 
representing the relation as consisting merely in invariable 
antecedence and consequence. In this he has been guilty of 
a glaring oversight. It may be all true, that there is nothing 
coming between the cause and its effect, and yet there may be, 
what he has inexcusably overlooked, a power or property in the 
substances acting as the cause to produce the effect. He calls 
in substances, we have seen. " The cause must always be a 
substance existing in a certain state, and the effect, too, a sub- 
stance existing in a certain state ; " — he does not see that 
in material action there are substances two or more in the 
cause, and substances two or more in the effect. But he fails 
to enquire what is involved in substances, and the qualities of 
substance, and does not discover that power is involved in 
substance and properties. It is but justice to Brown to add, 
that, in one very important particular, he differs from Hume ; 
that is, in regard to the mental principle which leads us to 
believe in the relation. This, according to Hume, is mere cus- 
tom ; whereas, according to Brown, it is an irresistible intu- 
itive belief. By this doctrine, he attached himself to the 
school of Reid, and saved his system from a sceptical tendency, 
with which it cannot be justly charged. This irresistible be- 
lief, he shows, constrains us to believe that the universe, as an 
effect, must have had a cause. It is to be regretted that he did 
not inquire a little more carefully into the nature of this in- 
tuitive belief which he is obliged to call in, when he would 
have found that it constrains us to believe not only in the 
invariability of the relation but in the potency of the sub- 
stances operating as causes to produce their effects. 

We are not concerned to follow him in his medical career, in 
which he became the associate of the famous Dr. Gregory 
in 1806. We are approaching a more momentous epoch in his 
life. Dugald Stewart being in a declining state of health, 



322 THOMAS BROWN. [Art. xliy. 

Brown lectured for him during a part of sessions 1808-9 and 
1809-10; and, in the summer of 18 10, Stewart having ex- 
pressed a desire to this effect, Brown was chosen his colleague, 
and, from that time, discharged the whole duties of the office 
of Professor of Moral Philosophy. 

Even those who have never seen him can form a pretty lively 
image of him at this time, when his talents have reached all the 
maturity of which they are capable, and his reputation is at its 
height. In person, he is about the middle size ; his features 
are regular, and in the expression of his countenance, and es- 
pecially of his eye, there is a combination of sweetness and 
calm reflection. His manner and address are somewhat too 
fastidious, not to say finical and feminine, for a philosopher ; 
but the youths who wait on his lectures are disposed to over- 
look this, when they fall under the influence of his gentleness, 
so fitted to win, and of the authority which he has to command. 
Expectation was on the tiptoe, and he fully met and gratified 
it. His amiable look, his fine elocution, his acuteness and 
ingenuity, his skill in reducing a complex subject into a few 
elements, his show of originality and independence, the seem- 
ing comprehensiveness of his system, and, above all, his fertility 
of illustration, and the glow, like that of stained glass, in which 
he set forth his refined speculations, did more than delight his 
youthful audience, — it entranced them ; and, in their ecstasies, 
they declared that he was superior to all the philosophers who 
had gone before him, and, in particular, that he had completely 
superseded Reid, and they gave him great credit, in that he 
generously refrained from attacking and overwhelming Stewart. 
He had every quality fitted to make him a favorite with stu- 
dents. His eloquence would have been felt to be too elaborate 
by a younger audience, and regarded as too artificial and senti- 
mental by an older audience, but exactly suited the tastes of 
youths between sixteen and twenty. A course so eminently 
popular among students had not, I rather think, been delivered 
in any previous age in the University of Edinburgh, and has not, 
in a later age, been surpassed in the fervor excited by Chalmers 
or Wilson. In the last age you would have met, in Edin- 
burgh and all over Scotland, with ministers and lawyers who 
fell into raptures when they spoke of his lectures, and assured 
the younger generation that in comparison with him Wilson 



Art. xliv.] AS A LECTURER. 3 2 3 

was no philosopher, and Hamilton a stiff pedant. It should 
be added, that, when the students attending him were asked 
what they had got, not a few could answer only by exclamations 
of admiration, " How fine ! " " How beautiful ! " " How ingen- 
ious ! " In those large classes in the Scottish colleges which 
are taught exclusively by written lectures, large numbers, in- 
cluding the dull, the idly inclined, and the pleasure-loving, are 
apt to pass through without receiving much benefit, — unless, 
indeed, the professor be a very systematic examiner and labo- 
rious exacter of written exercises ; and this, I rather think, 
Brown was not. As he left the impression on his students, 
that there was little wisdom in the past, and that his own sys- 
tem was perfect, he did not create a spirit of philosophic read- 
ing such as Hamilton evoked in select minds in a later age. 
But all felt the glow of his spirit, had a fine literary taste awak- 
ened by his poetical bursts, had their acuteness sharpened by 
his fine analysis, went away with a high idea of the spirituality 
of the soul, and retained through life a lively recollection of 
his sketches of the operations of the human mind. This, I 
venture to affirm, is a more wholesome result than what was 
substituted for psychology in the succeeding age, — a priori 
discussions derived from Germany, or demonstrated idealisms 
spun out by an exercise of human ingenuity. 

His biographer tells us that, on his appointment to the chair, 
he had retired into the country in order that fresh air and exer- 
cise might strengthen him for his labors, and that, when the 
session opened, he had only the few lectures of the previous 
winters ; but such was the fervor of his genius and the readi- 
ness of his pen, that he generally commenced the composition 
of a lecture after tea and had it ready for delivery next day by 
noon, and that nearly the whole of the lectures contained in 
the first three of the four-volumed edition were written the first 
year of his professorship, and the whole of the remaining next 
session. Nor does he appear to have rewritten any portion of 
them, or to have been disposed to review his judgments, or 
make up what was defective in his philosophic reading. He 
seems to have wasted his life in sending forth volume after vol- 
ume of poetry, which is, doubtless, beautifully and artistically 
composed, after the model of the English poets of the eigh- 
teenth century, but its pictures are without individuality, and 



324 THOMAS BROWN. [Art. xliv. 

they fail to call forth hearty feeling. Far more genuine po- 
etical power comes out incidentally in some of the bursts in 
his philosophic lectures than in whole volumes of his elab- 
orate versification. 

The incidents of his remaining life are few, but are sufficient 
to bring out the lineaments of his character. His chief enjoy- 
ments lay in his study, in taking a quiet walk in some solitary 
place, where he would watch the smoke curling from a cottage 
chimney, or the dew illuminated with sunshine on the grass, 
and in the society of his family and a few friends. Never had 
a mother a more devoted son, or sisters a more affectionate 
brother. In his disposition there is great gentleness, with a 
tendency to sentimentality : — thus, on the occasion of his last 
visit to his native place, he is thrown into a flood of sensibility, 
which, when it is related in future years to Chalmers, on his 
happening to be in the place, the sturdier Scotch divine was 
thrown into a fit of merriment. We perceive that he is fond 
of fame and sensitive of blame, but seeking to cherish both as 
a secret flame ; and that he is by no means inclined to allow- 
any one to offer him counsel. In 1819, he prepared his 
" Physiology of the Mind," as a text-book for his students, and 
put it into the press the following winter. By the Christmas 
of that year he was rather unwell ; in spring he removed for 
the benefit of his health to London, and died at Brompton in 
April, 1820. His remains were deposited in the churchyard 
of his native place, beside those of his father and mother. 

His lectures were published shortly after his death, and ex- 
cited an interest wherever the English language is spoken, 
quite equal to that awakened by the living lecturer among the 
students of Edinburgh. They continued for twenty years to 
have a popularity in the British dominions and in the United 
States greater than any philosophical work ever enjoyed before. 
During these years most students were introduced to meta- 
physics by the perusal of them, and attractive beyond measure 
did they find them to be. The writer of this article would give 
much to have revived within him the enthusiasm which he felt 
when he first read them. They had never, however, a great 
reputation on the Continent, where the sensational school 
thought he had not gone sufficiently far in analysis ; where 
those fighting with the sensational school did not feel that he 



Art. xliv.] TO WHOM INDEBTED. 325 

was capable of yielding them any aid ; and where the tran- 
scendental school, in particular, blamed him for not rendering 
a sufficiently deep account of some of the profoundest ideas 
which the mind of man can entertain, such as those of space, 
time, and infinity. His reputation was at its greatest height 
from 1830 to 1835, from which date it began to decline, partly 
because it was seen that his analyses were too ingenious, and 
his omissions many and great ; and partly because new schools 
were engaging the philosophic mind ; and, in particular, the 
school of Coleridge, the school of Cousin, and the school of 
Hamilton. Coleridge was superseding him by views derived 
from Germany, which he had long been inculcating, regarding 
the distinction between the understanding and the reason ; 
Cousin, by a brilliant eclectic system, which professedly drew 
largely from Reid and Kant ; and Hamilton, by a searching 
review of Brown's theory of perception, and by his own meta- 
physical views promulgated in his lectures and his published 
writings. The result of all this was a recoil of feeling in which 
Brown was as much undervalued as he had at one time been 
overrated. In the midst of these laudations and condemna- 
tions, Brown's psychological system has never been completely 
reviewed. Now that he has passed through a period of unde- 
served popularity, and a period of unmerited disparagement, 
the public should be prepared to listen with candor to an im- 
partial criticism. 

The psychology of Brown may be summarily described as a 
combination of the Scottish philosophy of Reid and Stewart, 
and of the analyses by Condillac, Destutt de Tracy, and the 
higher philosophers of the sensational school of France, to- 
gether with views of the association of ideas derived from a 
prevailing British school. To Reid and Stewart he was in- 
debted more than he was willing to allow, and it would have 
been better for his ultimate reputation had he imbibed more 
of their spirit, and adhered more closely to their principles. 
He admits everywhere with them the existence of principles 
of irresistible belief ; for example, he comes to such a princi- 
ple when he is discussing the beliefs in our personal identity, 
and in the invariability of the relation between cause and 
effect. But acknowledging, as he does, the existence of intui- 
tive principles, he makes no inquiry into their nature and laws 



326 THOMAS BROWN. [Art. xliv 

and force, or the relation in which they stand to the faculties. 
In this respect, so far from being an advance on Reid and 
Stewart, he is rather a retrogression. His method is as much 
that of Condillac, Destutt de Tracy, and the ideologists of 
France, as that of Reid and Stewart. He is infected with the 
besetting sin of metaphysicians, — that of trusting to analyses 
instead of patient observation ; and, like the French school, 
his analysis is exercised in reducing the phenomena of the 
mind to as few powers as possible, and this he succeeds in 
doing by omitting some of the most characteristic peculiarities 
of the phenomena. His classification of the faculties bears a 
general resemblance to that of M. de Tracy, the metaphysi- 
cian of the sensational school. The Frenchman's division of 
the faculties is — sensibility, memory, judgment, and desire; 
Brown's is — sensation, simple and relative suggestion, and 
emotion. 

In estimating the influences exercised from without on 
Brown, we must further take into account, that ever since the 
days of Hartley there had been a great propensity in Britain to 
magnify the power and importance of the association of ideas. 
Not only habit but most of our conceptions and beliefs had 
been referred to it : Beattie and Alison, followed by Jeffrey, 
ascribed to it our ideas of beauty ; and, in a later age, Sir 
James Mackintosh carried this tendency the greatest length, 
and helped to bring about a reaction, by tracing our very idea 
of virtue to this source. It is evident that Brown felt this in- 
fluence largely. Our intelligence is resolved by him into sim- 
ple and relative suggestion. There is a flagrant and inexcusa- 
ble oversight here. All that association, or, as he designates 
it, suggestion, can explain, is the order of the succession of our 
mental states ; it can render no account of the character of the 
states themselves. It might show, for example, in what cir- 
cumstances a notion of any kind arises, say our notion of time, 
or space, or extension, but cannot explain the nature of the 
notion itself. 

But it will be necessary to enter a little more minutely into 
the system of Brown. From the affection which I bear to his 
memory, and remembering that his views have never been used 
by himself or others to undermine any of the great principles 
of morality, I would begin with his excellences. 



Art. xliv.] HIS EXCELLENCES. 3 2 7 

1. In specifying these, I am inclined to mention, first, his 
lofty views of man's spiritual being. He everywhere draws 
the distinction between mind and body very decidedly. In this 
respect, he is a true follower of the school of Descartes and 
Reid, and is vastly superior to some who, while blaming Locke 
and Brown for holding views tending to sensationalism, or even 
materialism, do yet assure us that the essential distinction be- 
tween mind and matter is now broken down. 

2. I have already referred to the circumstance, that Brown 
stands up resolutely for intuitive principles, and in this respect 
is a genuine disciple of the Scottish school. He calls them by 
the very name which some prefer as most expressive, — " be- 
liefs ; " and employs the test which Leibnitz and Kant have been 
so lauded as introducing into philosophy. He everywhere 
characterizes them as " irresistible, " — a phrase pointing to 
the same quality as " necessary," — the term used by the 
German metaphysicians. No one, not even Cousin, has de- 
monstrated, in a more effective manner, that our belief in cause 
and effect is not derived from experience. " When we say, 
then, that B will follow A to-morrow, because A was followed 
by B to-day, we do not prove that the future will resemble the 
past, but we take for granted that the future is to resemble the 
past. We have only to ask ourselves why we believe in this 
similarity of sequence ; and our very inability of stating any 
ground of inference may convince us that the belief, which it 
is impossible for us not to feel [observe the appeal to necessity, 
but it is an appeal to a necessity of feeling], is the result of 
some other principle of reasoning." (" Cause and Effect," 
P. hi.) " In ascribing the belief of efficiency to such a prin- 
ciple, we place it, then, on a foundation as strong as that on 
which we suppose our belief of an external world, and even of 
our own identity, to rest. What daring atheist is he, who has 
ever truly disbelieved the existence of himself and others ? For 
it is he alone who can say, with corresponding argument, that he 
is an atheist, because there is no relation of cause and effect." 
" The just analysis, then, which reduces our expectation of sim- 
ilarity in the future trains of events to intuition, we may safely 
admit, without any fear of losing a single argument for the 
existence of God." By this doctrine he has separated himself for 
ever from sensationalists, and given great trouble to those clas- 



328 THOMAS BROWN. [Art. xliv. 

sifiers of philosophic systems who insist, contrary to the whole 
history of British philosophy, that all systems must either be 
sensational or ideal. It is quite obvious that such men as 
Butler, Brown, and Chalmers, cannot be included in either of 
the artificial compartments, and hence one ground of their 
neglect by the system-builders of our age. 

3. His account of sensation is characterized by fine analy- 
sis : in particular, his discrimination of the sensations com- 
monly ascribed to touch, and his separation of the muscular 
sense from the sense of touch proper. About this very time 
Charles Bell was establishing the distinction of the nerves of 
sensation and motion. " I was finally enabled," says Sir Charles, 
" to show that the muscles had two classes of nerves ; that on 
exciting one of these the muscles contracted, that on exciting 
the other no action took place. The nerve which had no power 
to make the muscle contract was found to be a nerve of 
sensation." Contemporaneously, Brown was arguing, on psy- 
chological grounds, that by the muscular sense we get knowl- 
edge which cannot be had from mere feeling or touch. " The 
feeling of resistance is, I conceive, to be ascribed not to our 
organ of touch but to our muscular frame." Hamilton, by 
his vast erudition, has been able (note appended to Reid's 
works) to detect anticipations of these views ; but they were 
not so clearly stated, and they were not conclusively de- 
monstrated. Brown started, and carried a certain length, those 
inquiries regarding the variety of sensations commonly as- 
cribed to touch, which have ever since had a place in psycho- 
logical treatises. 

4. Nor must we omit his ingenious and felicitous mode of 
illustrating the succession of our mental states, called by him 
"suggestion," to intimate that there is no connection in the 
nature of things between the ideas, and not " association," 
which might leave the impression that there was a nexus 
joining them. He is particularly successful in showing how 
by association the various ideas and, he adds, feelings blend, 
and, as it were, coalesce. He has called attention to an im- 
portant phenomenon, which has been little noticed ever since 
he brought it out to view, and which he himself did not see the 
significance of. " In our mental sequences, the one feeling 
which precedes and induces another feeling does not neces- 
sarily on that account give place to it ; but may continue in 



Art. xliv.] ONE LAW OF SUGGESTION. 329 

that virtual sense of combination, as applied to the phenomena 
of the mind, of which I have often spoken, to coexist with the 
new feeling which it excites, outlasting it, perhaps, and many 
other feelings to which, during its permanence, it may have given 
rise. I pointed out to you how important this circumstance 
in our mental constitution is to us in various ways : to our 
intellectual acquirements, since without it there would be no 
continued meditation, but only a hurrying confusion of image 
after image, in wilder irregularity than in the wildest of our 
dreams ; and to our virtue and happiness, since, by allowing 
the coexistence and condensation of various feelings in one 
complex emotion, it furnishes the chief source of those moral 
affections which it is at once our happiness to feel and our 
virtue to obey." He has here got a glimpse of a great truth, 
which needs to be developed more fully than it has yet been ; 
it is the power of a motive principle, and of a strong purpose 
and resolution abiding in the mind to sway the train of 
thoughts and feelings. Had he followed out his own hint, it 
would have led him to discover deep springs of action direct- 
ing the flow of suggestions. 

While he illustrates the laws of suggestion under the three 
Aristotelian heads of contiguity, resemblance, and contrast, he 
intimates his belief that they may all be reduced to a finer kind 
of contiguity. As the latest speculations have not yet got 
down to the depths of this subject, it may be useful to know 
the hints thrown out by Brown, who seems to me to be so far 
on the right track, but not to have reached the highest foun- 
tain from which the stream issues : — 

" All suggestion, as I conceive, may, if our analysis be sufficiently minute, 
be found to depend on prior existence, or at least on such immediate prox- 
imity as is itself very probably a modification of coexistence." He begins 
with resemblance : " if a portrait be faithfully painted, the effect which it 
produces on the eye that perceives it is the same, or very nearly the same, as 
the effect produced on the eye by similar light reflected from the living ob- 
ject ; and we might therefore almost as justly say, that when any individual 
is seen by us repeatedly he suggests himself by resemblance, as that he is 
thus suggested by his portrait." This surely comes very close to Hamil- 
ton's principle, that resembling objects, so far as they are alike, are the 
same, and to his law of repetition or identity. The following brings us 
quite as near his law of redintegration : " In many other cases, in which 
the resemblance is less complete, its operation may, even without such 
refinement of analysis as that to which I have alluded, be very obviously 
brought under the influence of contiguity. Thus, as the drapery forms 



330 THOMAS BROWN. [Art. xliv. 

so important a part of the complex perception of the human figure, the 
costume of any period may recall to us some distinguished person of that 
time. A ruff like that worn by Queen Elizabeth brings before us the sovereign 
herself, though the person who wears the ruff may have no other circum- 
stance of resemblance : because the ruff and the general appearance of 
Queen Elizabeth, having formed one complex whole in our mind, it is nec- 
essary only that one part of the complexity should be recalled — as the 
ruff in the case supposed — to bring back all the other parts by the mere 
principle of contiguity. The instance of drapery, which is but an adjunct 
or accidental circumstance of the person, may be easily extended to other 
instances, in which the resemblance is in parts of the real and permanent 
figure." "In this manner, by analyzing every complex whole, and tracing, 
in the variety of its composition, that particular part in which the actual 
similarity consists, — and which may therefore be supposed to introduce the 
other parts that have formerly coexisted with it, — we might be able to 
reduce every case of suggestion from direct resemblance — to the influence 
of mere contiguity." " By the application of a similar refined analysis to 
other tribes of associations, even to those of contrast, we may perhaps 
find that it would be possible to reduce these also to the same comprehen- 
sive influence of mere proximity as the single principle on which all sug- 
gestion is founded." I am far from holding that this analysis into parts 
of the concrete idea starting the suggestion, furnishes a complete solution 
of the difficulties connected with fixing on one ultimate law; but it seems 
to set us on the right track. 

He gives us a somewhat crude, but still important, clas- 
sification of what he calls the secondary laws of suggestion, 
which induce one associate conception rather than another. 
He mentions longer or shorter continuance ; more or less live- 
liness ; more or less frequently present ; more or less purity 
from the mixture of other feelings ; differences of original 
constitution ; differences of temporary emotion ; changes in 
the state of the body; and general tendencies produced by 
prior habits. Had this arrangement been presented by another 
he would have proceeded to reduce it to simpler elements. 

5. His distribution of the relations which the mind can 
discover is worthy of being looked at : they are — 

I. COEXISTENCE. 

1. Position. 

2. Resemblance or Difference. 

3. Degree. 

4. Proportion. 

5. Comprehension (whole and parts). 

II. SUCCESSION. 

6. Casual Priority. 

7. Causal Priority. 



Art. xliv.] RELATIONS AND GENERAL NOTIONS. 33 1 

This classification is worthy of being placed along side that 
of Locke and Hume. It may be compared with Kant's " Cate- 
gories of the Understanding ; " but it should be observed that 
the German metaphysician makes his categories forms im- 
posed by the mind on things, whereas the Scotch psychologist 
simply gives to the mind the power of discerning the relations 
in things. The arrangement of Brown is superior to that of 
Hamilton, to be afterwards discussed, and vastly more com- 
prehensive and just than that of those later physiological 
psychologists who reduce the relations which the mind can 
perceive to the single one of resemblance and difference, thus 
restricting the powers of intelligence within far narrower limits 
than have been assigned by nature, and all to make it some- 
what easier to account for the whole on materialistic principles. 

6. His biographer declares his account of the general notion 
to be a great advance on all that had been proposed by pre- 
vious philosophers. Brown states the process to be the fol- 
lowing : " We perceive two or more objects, — this is one state 
of the mind. We are struck with the feeling of their resem- 
blance in certain respects, — this is a second state of the mind. 
We then, in the third stage, give a name to these circum- 
stances of felt resemblance, a name which is, of course, applied 
afterwards only where this relation of similarity is felt. " He has 
here seized some of the characteristic steps in the process of 
forming the general notion. He is right in giving a prominent 
place to the discovery of resemblance, but he should have called 
it a perception of resemblance, and not a feeling of resemblance, 
— language which seems to ascribe the whole to the emotive 
rather than the cognitive part of our nature. And he has 
missed, after all, the essential, the consummating step, — the plac- 
ing of the objects under a head or in a class which embraces all 
the objects possessing the resembling qualities, to which class 
thus formed the name is given. He has a searching review of 
nominalism, which he charges with overlooking the resem- 
blance. He asks, " Why do I class together certain objects, 
and exclude certain others from the class which I have formed ? " 
He shows that the infant must reason before it has acquired 
language. " He has already calculated distances long before 
he knew the use of a single word expressive of distance. " 

7. He has some fine remarks on beauty. He separates from 



332 THOMAS BROWN. [Art. xliv. 

Alison, who resolves it into the general feelings of our nature, 
and argues resolutely that there is an original and unresolvable 
class of feelings excited by the beautiful. He remarks that 
in the emotion of beauty, " by a sort of reflex transfer to the 
object which excited it, we identify or combine our agreeable 
feeling with the very conception of the object, whether present 
or absent. " He is able to come to the conclusion : " It is mind 
alone that is the living fountain of beauty, because it is the 
mind which, by reflection from itself, embodies in the object or 
spreads over it its own delight. " He overlooks, however, the 
objective beauty arising from the harmony of sounds and colors, 
and from proportion and harmony. 

8. Some place higher than any of his other excellencies 
his eloquent exposition of the emotions, — an exposition which 
called forth the laudations both of Stewart and Chalmers, 
the latter of whom wrote a preface to that part of his lectures 
which treats of the feelings. He is particularly successful in 
showing that man is not by his nature and constitution a 
selfish being, but is possessed of social and benevolent affections. 
His lectures on the emotions are radiant all over with poetry, 
and will repay a careful reading much better than many of 
the scholastic discussions or anatomical descriptions which are 
furnished in some of the chairs of mental science. 

9. It would be injustice not to add that he has some very 
splendid illustrations of natural theism, fitted at once to refine 
and elevate the soul. I have never heard of any youth being 
inclined towards scepticism or pantheism, or becoming prejudiced 
against Christian truth, in consequence of attending or read- 
ing the lectures of Brown. In note E, appended to his work 
on " Cause and Effect, " he has a powerful argument in favor 
of the possibility of a miracle, showing that it is not incon- 
sistent with the intuitive law of cause and effect. " There is 
no violation of a law of nature, but there is a new consequent 
of a new antecedent. " 

Over against these excellencies I have to place certain 
grave deficiencies and errors. 

1. I take exception to the account which he gives of the 
very object and end of mental science. According to him, it 
is to analyze the complex into the simple, and discover the 
laws of the succession of our mental states. There is a great 



Art. xliv.] HIS OVERSIGHTS. 333 

and obvious oversight here. The grand business of the 
science of the human mind is to observe the nature of our 
mental states, with the view of co-ordinating them and rising 
to the discovery of the laws which they obey and the facul- 
ties from which they proceed. Taking this view, analysis 
becomes a subordinate though of course an important instru- 
ment ; and we have to seek to discover the faculties which 
determine the nature of the states as well as the laws of 
their succession. 

2. In his analysis he often misses the main element of the 
concrete or complex phenomena. In referring ideas to sensation 
he neglects to consider how much is involved in body occu- 
pying space, and how much in body exercising property; and 
in the account of memory he fails to discover how much is im- 
plied in recognizing the event remembered as having happened 
in time past, — that is, he omits the idea of time. Often, too, 
when he has accomplished an analysis of a complex state, 
does he forget the elements, and reminds us of the boy who 
imagines that he has annihilated a piece of paper when he has 
burnt it, forgetting that the elements are to be found in the 
smoke and in the ashes. It is by a most deceitful decom- 
position — it is by missing the very differentia of the phe- 
nomena — that he is able to derive all our intellectual ideas from 
sensation and simple and relative suggestion. 

3. He grants that there are intuitive principles of belief in 
the mind ; but he has never so much as attempted an induc- 
tion of them, or an exposition of their nature and of the laws 
which regulate them, or a classification of them. In this 
respect he must be regarded as falling behind his predecessors 
in the school, and behind Hamilton, who succeeded him in 
the estimation of students of mental science. The intelligent 
reader is greatly disappointed to find him, after he has shown 
so forcibly that there is an intuition involved in our belief 
in personal identity and in causation, immediately dropping 
these intuitions and inquiring no more into their nature. He 
takes great credit for reducing the faculties and principles 
enumerated by Reid to a much smaller number ; but if we 
gather up all the elements which he is obliged to bring in, 
we shall find the list to be as large as that of Reid or 
Stewart. 



334 THOMAS BROWN. [Art. xliv. 

4. Thus he represents consciousness as merely a general 
term for all the states and affections of mind ; and then, in order 
to account for our belief in the sameness of self, he is obliged 
to call in a special instinct. "We believe our identity, as 
one mind, in oar feelings of to-day and our feelings of yester- 
day, as indubitably as we believe that the fire which burned 
yesterday would in the same circumstances burn us to-day, — 
not from reasoning, but from a principle of instinct and irre- 
sistible belief, such as gives to reasoning itself all its validity. " 
It is this irresistible belief, involved in the very nature of 
consciousness, this belief in self and the identity of self, which 
makes consciousness — I mean self-consciousness (and not a 
vague consciousness) — a separate faculty. This faculty is a 
source to us of a separate set of cognitions and ideas, the know- 
ledge of self and of the states of self, — such as thinking, feel- 
ing, resolving. 

5. According to Brown, in perception through the senses 
we look immediately on a sensation in the mind, and not on 
any thing out of the mind. Hamilton has severely criticised 
this doctrine. Hamilton had a discriminately searching classi- 
fication of the forms which ideal sense-perception had assumed, 
and he makes Brown's theory one of the forms of idealism. 
But the truth is, Brown's doctrine can scarcely be called 
idealism. It might be appropriately called inferentialism. It is 
the same substantially as that of Destutt de Tracy and the 
French ideologists, who, maintaining the existence of body, 
argued that infants reach a knowledge of it by a process of 
inference. The argument is unfolded by Brown at great 
length and with much ingenuity. The mind can never perceive 
any thing directly but the sensation, but then this sensation 
as a phenomenon must have a cause. He argues this on the 
principle, perceived to be intuitively certain, that every effect 
has a cause. The sensation then must have a cause ; but then 
it has not, like some other of our mental states and affections, 
— such as our sentiments and perceptions of duty, — a cause 
within the mind itself ; it must therefore have a cause without 
the mind, and this cause is matter. It is clear as to this infer- 
ence, that it will be acknowledged frankly only by those 
who look on causation as an intuitive conviction. If belief 
in causation be merely experimental, it is doubtful whether 



Art. xliv.] DEFECTIVE ANALYSIS. 335 

we should ever discover the law to be universal, for by far 
the greater number of our sensations would be phenomena of 
which we could discover no cause. We might group the 
phenomena in some way, but we should not be able to say 
logically whether they have a cause or not. But leaving this, 
as perhaps only a doubtful point, we can affirm confidently 
that even if, by such a process, we could infer that these 
sensations have a cause, it must be an unknown cause, a cause 
of which we have no experience. But matter seems to be 
something known. We certainly have an idea of extension, or 
rather of something extended — I would add, a belief in an ex- 
tended substance. Our belief is not in an unknown cause, but 
in a known existence, — known as existing and extended. But 
we never could reach the belief, we never could reach even the 
idea of space which we certainly have, by any logical process 
proceeding on the existence of a sensation. From a sensation, 
which is unextended, we cannot rise to the idea of an extended 
thing. Logically and consequentially, Brown's theory of the 
cognition of matter prepared the way for that of J. S. Mill, 
who makes our idea of body to be of a mere possibility of 
sensations. 

6. He overlooks some of the distinguishing attributes of the 
reproductive powers of the mind. Conception, memory, and 
imagination are merely exercises of simple suggestion. He does 
not give the phantasy or imaging power a separate place. " Mem- 
ory is not a distinct intellectual faculty, but is merely con- 
ception or suggestion combined with the feeling of a particular 
relation, — the relation to which we give the name of priority." 
Observe what confusion of things we have here : memory is 
a " suggestion, " but implies a " relation, " which is represented as 
a " feeling ; ' ; and " priority, " implying the idea of time past, 
present, and future, comes in so quietly that we are not ex- 
pected to notice it, though it is one of the most profound of 
our ideas. In imagination, he overlooks that high intellectual 
power which binds the scattered images in a unity, often of a 
very grand character. A simplification gained by overlooking 
these characteristic qualities is altogether illusive. 

7. In his account of the faculties of relative suggestion, 
he mixes up two things which ought to be carefully distin- 
guished, — the suggestion, which is a mere law of the succession 



336 THOMAS BROWN. [Art. xliv. 

of our ideas, and comparison, by which we discover the relations 
of things. He cannot make these one by calling them by the 
one name of relative suggestion. 

8. He has discovered an important element in the process of 
reasoning. He sees that in reasoning there is the explication 
of what is involved in the conceptions ; but he does not notice 
the laws of comprehension and extension involved in drawing 
one conception from another or others. 

9. He has a fine exposition of the emotions, dividing them 
according to the principle of time, — as immediate, retrospective, 
and prospective ; but he overlooks two essential elements. 
One is, the idea or phantasm as the basis of the emotion. We 
cannot have a feeling towards a mother unless we have an idea 
of her. He is guilty of a greater oversight : he has taken no 
notice of those springs of action or motive principles, dwelt on 
by Stewart, — such as the love of self, of our neighbor, of 
society, of power, — which call forth and guide the emotions in 
certain channels. 

10. He does not distinguish between our emotions on the 
one hand and the wishes and volitions on the other, — a dis- 
tinction always drawn in one form or other by our highest 
moralists, and strongly insisted on by Kant and his school in 
Germany. Surely there is a difference in kind between such 
an emotion as that of hope or fear on the one hand and a pur- 
pose or determination to act on the other. With Brown, will 
is merely the prevailing desire, and desire an emotion. 

11. His view of the moral faculty is very defective. It is 
represented by him as a mere class of emotions. He calls 
them " emotions of approbation and disapprobation. " The 
very epithets employed by him, " approbation " and "disap- 
probation, " might have shown that judgment is involved. 
Conscience is not only an emotive, it is a cognitive power, 
revealing to us what ought and ought not to be done. Dr. 
Chalmers shows that he has overlooked the great truth brought 
out by Butler, that conscience is a power in the mind, not sim- 
ply co-ordinate with the others, but authoritative and supreme, 
claiming subjection from all the voluntary powers. Nor ought 
it to be omitted that he does not bring out fully that the moral 
faculty declares man to be a sinner. He thus constructed an 
ethical system, and delivered it in Edinburgh, — which some- 



Art. xlv.] FRANCIS JEFFREY, 337 

times claims to be the metropolis of evangelical theology, — 
without a reference to redemption or grace. No teachers ever 
inculcated a purer moral system than Reid, Stewart, or Brown ; 
but they do not seem willing to look at the fact that man falls 
infinitely beneath the purity of the moral law. They give us 
lofty views of the moral power in man, but forget to tell 
that this power condemns him. Taking up the demonstrations 
of the Scottish metaphysicians in regard to the conscience, an 
inquiry should be made, — How are they affected by the circum- 
stance that man is a sinner? This was the grand topic 
started by Chalmers, and by which he effected a reconciliation 
between the philosophy and the theology of Scotland. 

1 2. He has not been able to give an adequate account of some 
of the profoundest ideas which the mind of man entertains ; such 
as, that of personal identity, of power in substances, of infinity 
and moral good. The tendency of his philosophy was counter- 
acted in the next age by Coleridge, Cousin, and Hamilton, 
drawing largely from German sources. 



XLV.— FRANCIS JEFFREY. 1 

Francis Jeffrey was not specially a metaphysician, but he 
studied metaphysics and wrote upon them, and so deserves a 
passing notice. He was the son of a depute clerk of the Court of 
Session, and was born on a " flat " in Charles Street, Edinburgh, 
October 23, 1773. At the age of eight, he entered (in an in- 
tensely excited state) the high school, at that time presided over 
by Dr. Adam, a scholar and a man of character ; and at fourteen 
he entered Glasgow College with some idea of getting an Oxford 
exhibition, and there he was under Jardine, the professor of logic 
and rhetoric, of whom he says : " It is to him and his most judi- 
cious instruction I owe my taste for letters, and any literary 
distinction I may since have been enabled to attain." A fellow- 
student, afterwards Principal Macfarlan of Glasgow, reports of 
him that in the first year " he exhibited nothing remarkable, 

1 " Life of Francis Jeffrey," by Lord Cockburn. 



33$ FRANCIS JEFFREY. [Art. xlv. 

except a degree of quickness, bordering, as some thought, on pet- 
ulance ; " and another fellow-student, afterwards Principal Hal- 
dane of St. Andrews, describes him as a little black creature 
whom he had not observed, but was noticed by him as haranguing 
some boys on the college green against voting for Adam 
Smith as lord rector, and who was opposed by young Jeffrey 
because he was the candidate of the professors. In the second 
year he broke upon them very brilliantly as one of the most acute 
and fluent speakers, his favorite subjects being criticism and 
metaphysics. While at college he was most diligent in writing, 
in a terribly illegible hand, whole volumes of notes of his 
professors' lectures, mixed with remarks of his own, and innu- 
merable essays, most of them of a critical character. Francis 
Jeffrey was absolutely destined to be a critic. Any one might 
have seen this in these restless eyes, ever scintillating, and 
might have argued it from his quick and clear apprehension, 
from his searching spirit and his sound judgment on all subjects 
not requiring wide comprehension or original genius. On leav- 
ing Glasgow, he went home to the ''dear, retired, adored little 
window " of his Lawnmarket garret, and again scribbled papers, 
sixty of which remained in the time of his biographer. Jeffrey 
was the genuine product of the lecture-hearing, essay-writing, 
debating-society privileges of the Scottish colleges. In 1791 
he went up to Oxford, the instruction in which, as requiring 
quiet study and no writing, he did not enjoy so much as that of 
Glasgow, and he describes his fellow-students as " pedants, cox- 
combs, and strangers." He eagerly sought when in England 
to get rid of his Scotch pronunciation, and succeeded in ac- 
quiring a clipped and affected English. At the end of the 
academic year, he went back to Scotland, where he got into the 
heart of a body of clever and ambitious youths. His pecul- 
iar talents were specially called forth by the " Speculative 
Society," which had been instituted in 1764, and which reached 
its highest reputation at the time he attended it ; and there he 
had to wrestle with such men as Francis Horner, Henry 
Brougham, Lord Lansdowne,and David Boyle, afterwards presi- 
dent of the Court of Session ; and Henry Cockburn tells us how 
enraptured he was with speeches by him on national character, 
by Horner on the immortality of the soul, and Brougham on the 
power of Russia. I doubt much whether any of them threw 



Art. xlv.] THE "EDINBURGH REVIEW." 339 

much light on these subjects ; but they discussed them ably, and 
to the great delight of the aspiring youths of Edinburgh. His 
business consisted in attending law lectures, and his amuse- 
ment in writing thousands of lines of poetry, the moon being the 
special object of his admiration among natural beauties. His 
ambition then was, " I should like, therefore, to be the rival of 
Smith and Hume." He joined conscientiously and eagerly the 
Whig party, which included such men as James Gibson (after- 
wards Sir James Gibson Craig), the Rev. Sir Henry Wellwood 
Moncreiff, John Allen, John Thomson in the medical profes- 
sion, and Dugald Stewart and John Play fair in the college ; 
and in doing so he knowingly cut himself off from all hope of 
receiving government patronage. 

We now come to the most important event in his life, — 
the establishment of the " Edinburgh Review," the first number 
of which appeared in October, 1802. The account is given by 
Sydney Smith : " One day we happened to meet on the eighth or 
ninth story or flat [it was actually the third, but the whole party 
wished to make their descriptions lively and telling] in Buccleuch 
Place, the elevated residence of the then Mr. Jeffrey. I proposed 
we should set up a Review : this was acceded to with acclamation. 
I was appointed editor (not formally), and remained long enough 
in Edinburgh to edit the first number." The most influential 
writers were Jeffrey, Smith, 1 Brougham, and Horner ; but the 
ruling spirit and the guiding hand was Jeffrey, who now found 
the sphere for which he was fitted by native taste and 
capacity, and for which he had been prepared by his whole train- 
ing in reading miscellaneously and writing systematically, and 
in his legal learning. Horner describes him at this period, 
" when, the genius of that little man was almost unknown to 
all but his most intimate acquaintances. His manner is not at 
first pleasing ; but, what is worse, it is of that cast which almost 
irresistibly impresses upon strangers the idea of levity and 
superficial talents. Yet there is not any man whose real char- 
acter is so much the reverse. He has, indeed, a very sportive 

1 I am afraid we cannot claim Sydney Smith (born 1771, died 1845) as one °* 
the Scotch metaphysicians as he was not a Scotchman : he merely resided for 
a time in Edinburgh. But his "Lectures on Moral Philosophy," delivered in 
London, 1804-6, and published in a volume (1850), is drawn from the Scottish 
philosophy, especially from Stewart, and is a remarkably clear, lively, and judicious 
work. 



340 FRANCIS JEFFREY. [Art. xlv. 

and playful fancy ; but it is accompanied with an extensive and 
varied information, and a readiness of apprehension almost 
intuitive, with judicious and calm discernment, with a profound 
and penetrating understanding." 

The starting of the " Edinburgh Review," with its blue and 
yellow cover, undoubtedly constituted an era in the history of 
literature. There had been magazines and even reviews, such 
as the earlier " Edinburgh Review," but none of the same compre- 
hensive, independent, and fearless character. Hitherto literary 
periodicals had been very much the organs of booksellers ; but 
these bold youths undertook to make the publisher their mere 
agent, and required him to pay decently for the articles. In the 
first number seven articles were written by Smith, four by 
Horner, four commonly ascribed to Brougham, and five by 
Jeffrey. None of the writers were learned, in the proper 
sense of the term ; none of them were engaged in profound in- 
vestigations : but they were all well informed men, and possessed 
of brilliant talents, if not of genius. They wrote quickly, easily, 
clearly, pungently, with quite as much information as their 
readers wished. The early writers did little fitted to advance 
science, or the higher forms of literary genius ; but they cut 
down pretension of every kind unmercifully, and they were 
ever in favor of good taste and good sense. They have left 
nothing permanent themselves ; but they produced a mighty 
influence on their own age and through it on the succeeding 
age. They failed to discover the rising genius of Byron ; they 
did not appreciate Wordsworth ; they did not encourage the 
study of Goethe, 1 and of the great German writers ; they ridi- 

1 Thus of Wordsworth's "Excursion" Jeffrey says: "This will never do." 
"It is longer, weaker, and tamer than any of Mr. Wordsworth's other produc- 
tions." Of Goethe's " Wilhelm Meister " he says : "To us it certainly appears, 
after the most deliberate consideration, to be eminently absurd, puerile, incon- 
gruous, vulgar, and affected ; and, though redeemed by considerable powers of 
invention and some traits of vivacity, to be so far from perfection as to be almost 
from beginning to end one flagrant offence against every principle of taste and 
every rule of composition." How different the estimate formed by Thomas Car- 
lyle of the second period of the Edinburgh Review ! The late Lord Ashburton 
shortly after the decease of his lady, who was a great admirer of Carlyle, did the 
author of this work the honor of applying to him to explain what Carlyle could 
mean by an advice which he gave. " I inquired of him," said his Lordship, 
"what I could do to form my character, and make myself what I ought to be. 
'Read "Wilhelm Meister,"' said he. So I read 'Wilhelm Meister ' and went 
back to my counsellor, saying that I had read the book and admired it, but could 



Art. xl v.]" AS A LAWYER. 341 

culed missionary effort when it appeared in the churches, and 
proclaimed that heathen nations must be civilized before they 
can be Christianized, — as if to teach men that they have a soul 
were not the most potent means of awakening thought and 
thereby starting civilization. But the " Review" promoted a 
healthy tone of writing and a liberal spirit in politics, and helped 
more than any other literary organ to effect a reform in the 
legislature. From this time forth, Francis Jeffrey became 
the terror of all authors about to publish, and of all bigoted 
Tory politicians. While thus an object of dread to strangers, 
he seems to have been loved by all who knew him. He was 
editor of the " Review" for twenty-seven years, and wrote two 
hundred and sixty-one articles. He published a selection from 
these in 1843. 

Though obnoxious to the government of the day, and without 
political or family patronage, and not a favorite with some 
of the old writers to the signet who had the means of sending 
cases to him or keeping them back, he rose steadily at the bar, 
and in the course of years stood in the first rank. He was 
well read in law, was particularly fitted to discuss questions 
of right and equity, was clear and philosophical in his arrange- 
ment, ingenious in his arguments, fluent in utterance, tasteful 
in language, ready at reply, poignant in repartee, and sharp in 
his strokes of wit. Judges came to appreciate his legal ability, 
juries liked his point and life, and church courts enjoyed his 
ingenious defences of bad causes, which he was often called 
to defend. 

We are now arrived at the second great literary epoch of 
the capital of Scotland. In the first, that of the last half of 
the previous century, had appeared a number of grave and 
thinking men, each striking out a path for himself. This second 
consisted of a brilliant circle of writers, critics, and talkers. 
They formed a club of which Scott, Jeffrey, Stewart, Playfair, 
Sydney Smith, Brougham, the " Man of Feeling," Cockburn, 

not discover any thing in it fitted to accomplish the end I have in view. ' Read 
" Wilhelm Meister,"' said the great man, ' a second time.' Now I have read it 
a second time without getting what I wish. I now come to you to see if you can 
tell me what Carlyle can mean." I told him he must go to the oracle himself to 
find out what he meant : but I added that I believed that neither Goethe nor 
Carlyle, though eminent literary geniuses, knew of, or could direct him to, what 
might effect the good end his Lordship had in view. 



342 FRANCIS JEFFREY. [Art. xlv. 

Horner, Alison, and Thomas Brown were members. In this 
circle, the two most eminent men were Walter Scott, the poet 
and reputed novelist, and Francis Jeffrey, the critic. " Edin- 
burgh was at that time, to a far greater extent than it is now 
the resort of the families of the gentry, who used to leave their 
country residences and enjoy the gayety and the fashion which 
their presence tended to promote. Many of the curious charac- 
ters and habits of the preceding age — the last purely Scotch age 
that Scotland was destined to see — still lingered among us." 
After this time the ambitious youths of Scotland trooped to 
London, and left Edinburgh as specially a lawyers' city, relieved 
by a healthy mixture of university professors, of eminent doctors, 
and high-class teachers. When Jeffrey's professional income be- 
came large, he had as his residence Craigcrook, three miles north- 
west of Edinburgh, on the eastern slope of the Corstorphine Hill, 
and he lived there thirty-four seasons. Thither a select but mis- 
cellaneous band of visitors resorted on the Saturday afternoons 
" The Craigcrook party began to assemble about three, each 
taking to his own enjoyment. The bowling-green was sure to 
have its matches in which the host joined with skill and keen- 
ness ; the garden had its loiterers ; the wall, not forgetting the 
wall of yellow roses, their worshippers ; the hill its prospect- 
seekers. The banquet that followed was generous ; the wines 
never spared, but rather too various ; mirth unrestrained except 
by propriety ; the talk always good, but never ambitious, and 
those listening in no disrepute." 

As he had promoted the cause of parliamentary reform so 
steadily and consistently, there was an appropriateness in his 
being sent to the House of Commons, where he spoke in behalf 
of the Reform Bill, and, after the Reform Bill passed, in his 
being the representative of the city of Edinburgh. One of the 
great speeches in behalf of the bill was by him, and he carried 
through the Scotch Reform Bill and the Borough Reform mea- 
sure. Still his career in Parliament was not eminently success- 
ful. I remember that, when he was first sent to St. Stephen's, 
the question was eagerly discussed in Edinburgh, whether their 
great literary critic was likely to prove a parliamentary states- 
man and orator, when Chalmers decided, " he wants momentum." 
He retired from the House of Commons in 1834, and became a 
judge, his decisions being always wise and weighty. In partic- 



Art. xlv.] HIS ARTICLE ON BEAUTY. 343 

ular he defended the ancient rights and the independence of 
the church of Scotland in a very able paper, showing that he 
had a very clear apprehension of the distinction between the 
spiritual and temporal powers. When between four and five 
hundred ministers threw up their livings rather than submit to 
have the spiritual privileges of the church and the liberties of 
the people trampled on, he exclaimed : " I am proud of my coun- 
try." He died January, 1850, giving so far as is known no reli- 
gious sign either in life or in death. 

In his " Contributions to the Edinburgh Review," he has a 
number of articles on metaphysical subjects. He has a long re- 
view, afterwards republished in the " Encyclopaedia Britannica," 
of Alison on Taste. He argues against the notion of beauty 
being a simple sensation, or the object of a separate and pecul- 
iar faculty, and urges the difference of tastes as a proof of this : 
an analogous argument might show that there was no faculty to 
discern truth or moral good. He also opposes the idea of 
beauty being a real property of objects. He then expounds his 
own theory. " In our opinion, then, our sense of beauty de- 
pends entirely on our previous experience of simpler pleasures 
or emotions, and consists in the suggestion of agreeable or inter- 
esting sensations with which we had formerly been made familiar 
by the direct and intelligible agency of our common sensibilities ; 
and that vast variety of objects to which we give the name of 
beautiful become entitled to that appellation, merely because 
they all possess the power of recalling or reflecting those sensa- 
tions of which they have been the accompaniments, or with which 
they have been associated in our imagination by any other 
more casual bond of connection." This theory differs slightly 
from that of Alison ; but is not an improvement of it, and is liable 
to the same objections. In one point, he seems to have the 
advantage of the author he reviews. Jeffrey holds the percep- 
tion of beauty " to be, in most cases, quite instantaneous, and 
altogether as immediate as the perception of the external qual- 
ities of the object to which it is ascribed." I believe that Ali- 
son is right when he says that there is a flow of imagination ; but 
then there must be something to start it, and this something — be 
it a color, a form, a sound, a harmony — raises a feeling at once, 
and is entitled to be called beautiful. He maintains that ob- 
jects are sublime or beautiful when, along with other qualities, 



344 FRANCIS JEFFREY. [Art. xlv. 

they act as " natural signs and perpetual concomitants of pleas- 
urable sensations, or, at any rate, of some lively feeling or 
emotion in ourselves, or in some other sentient beings." I am 
inclined to think that beautiful objects act as signs, but they do 
so by suggesting ideas of the true and the good. 

He has a review of Priestley, and in it examines materialism. 
He shows that " the qualities of matter are perceived, but per- 
ception cannot be perceived." " If the eye and the ear, with 
their delicate structures and fine sensibility, are but vehicles 
and apparatus, why should the attenuated and unknown tissues 
of the cerebral nerves be supposed to be any thing else ? " 
" Their proposition is, not that motion produces sensation, — 
which might be as well in the mind as in the body, — but that 
sensation is motion, and that ail the phenomena of thought and 
perception are intelligently accounted for by saying that they 
are certain little shakings in the pulpy part of the brain." 
" There may be little shakings in the brain for any thing we 
know, and there may even be shakings of a different kind ac- 
companying every act of thought or perception ; but that the 
shakings themselves are the thought or perception we are so 
far from admitting that we find it absolutely impossible to com- 
prehend what is meant by the assertion." 

He has a review of Stewart's " Life of Reid " and of Stewart's 
" Philosophical Essays." He writes in the most laudatory 
terms of both, and of the Scotch philosophy generally. But 
he ventures to criticise them, and blames Reid for multiplying 
without necessity the number of original principles and affec- 
tions : he sees no reason for admitting a principle of credulity 
or a principle of veracity in human nature, or for interpreting 
natural signs. He commends his exemplary diligence and suc- 
cess in subverting the ideal system, but adds : " We must confess 
that we have not been able to perceive how the destruction of 
the ideal can be held as a demonstration of the real existence 
of matter, " — as if Reid had ever claimed that it did so, or as 
if he had not expressly rested our belief on body on the princi- 
ple of common sense. He labors to show that mental science 
cannot bring with it any solid issues, and represents " the lofty 
estimate which Mr. Stewart has made of the practical of his fa- 
vorite study as one of those splendid visions by which men of 
genius have been so often misled in the enthusiastic pursuit of 



Art. xlv.] HIS REVIEW OF STEWART. 345 

science and virtue." No doubt psychology cannot directly add 
to our animal comforts, as chemistry can, but surely when we 
know approximately and provisionally (which is all we know 
in chemistry) the laws„of the senses, of memory, of association, 
imagination, judgment, reasoning, feeling, and conscience, we 
may get practical benefits of another kind in being better able 
to regulate our own minds and influence the minds of others. 
On one point he seems rather to have the advantage of Stew- 
art. In his review of Stewart's " Life and Writings of Reid," 
he maintains that it is principally by experiment, and not by 
mere observation, that those splendid improvements have been 
made which have erected so vast a trophy to the prospective 
genius of Bacon." Stewart replied, in his " Philosophical Es- 
says " and " Dissertation," showing that experiment is a species 
of observation and that mind can be and has been experimented 
on : " Hardly any experiment can be imagined which has not 
already been tried by the hand of nature." But Jeffrey has 
a truth which, however, he has not elaborated successfully. 
The physical investigator has much more accurate tests than 
the mental philosopher in the means which modern science has 
provided for weighing and measuring the results ; and this, I 
apprehend, is the main reason for the fact that there is less dis- 
puting about physical than mental laws. On the other hand, 
we have more immediate, constant, and familiar access to our 
thoughts and feelings than we have to any facts of natural phil- 
osophy ; and thus our knowledge of mind, scientific and practi- 
cal, may, without being so much observed by the vulgar, be as 
useful as our knowledge of physics, as it may at all times be 
restraining and constraining us, though unconsciously, and 
enabling us to sway the minds and actions of others. 



346 SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH. [Art. xlvi. 



XLVL — SIK JAMES MACKINTOSH} 

" I was born," he tells us, " at Aldowrie, on the banks of Loch 
Ness within seven miles of the town of Inverness, in Scotland, 
on the 26th of October, 1765." His father was a subaltern and 
younger brother, possessed of a small family property, and his 
mother was pressed with many anxieties ; but she and the whole 
female kindred combined to lavish kindness upon the child and 
possibly fondled him too much. In 1775, he was sent to the 
school at Fortrose. The boarding mistress was very pious and 
orthodox, and at times rebuked the usher who was suspected 
of some heretical opinions. He betook himself early to -reading 
thoughtful works, some of them beyond his years, such as 
Burnet on the Thirty-Nine Articles, and he formed opinions of 
his own, and became a warm advocate for free-will. 

" About the same time," he says, " I read the old translation (called 
Dryden's) of Plutarch's ' Lives ' and Echard's ' Roman History.' I well 
remember that the perusal of the last led me into a ridiculous habit, from 
which I shall never be totally free. I used to fancy myself emperor of 
Constantinople. I distributed offices and provinces amongst my school- 
fellows ; I loaded my favorites with dignity and power, and I often made 
the objects of my dislike feel the weight of my imperial resentment. I car- 
ried on the series of political events in solitude for several hours ;• I re- 
sumed them, and continued them from day to day for months. Ever since, 
I have been more prone to building castles in the air than most others. 
My castle-building has always been of a singular kind. It was not the an- 
ticipation of a sanguine disposition, expecting extraordinary success in its 
pursuits. My disposition is not sanguine, and my visions have generally 
regarded things as much unconnected with my ordinary pursuits and as 
little to be expected as the crown of Constantinople at the school of For- 
trose. These fancies, indeed, have never amounted to conviction, or, in 
other words, they have never influenced my actions ; but I must confess 
that they have often been as steady and of as regular recurrence as convic- 
tion itself, and that they have sometimes created a little faint expectation, — 
a state of mind in which my wonder that they should be realized \rt)uld not 
be so great as it rationally ought to be. The indulgence of this dreaming 
propensity produces good and bad consequences. It produces indolence, 
improvidence, cheerfulness ; a study is its favorite scene ; and I have no 
doubt that many a man, surrounded by piles of folios and apparently en- 
gaged in the most profound researches, is in reality often employed in dis- 
tributing the offices and provinces of the empire of Constantinople." 

1 "Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honorable Sir James Mackintosh," 
edited by his son, Robert James Mackintosh. 



Art. xlvi.] HIS YOUTHFUL READING. 347 

The instruction he received at school was loose and far from 
accurate. " Whatever I have done beyond has been since 
added by my own irregular reading. But no subsequent circum- 
stance could make up for that invaluable habit of vigorous and 
methodical industry which the indulgence and irregularity of 
my school life prevented me from acquiring, and of which I have 
painfully felt the want in every part of my life." In 1780 he 
went to college at Aberdeen. " I bought and read three or 
four books this first winter, which were very much out of the 
course of boys of fifteen anywhere, but most of all at Aber- 
deen. Among them was Priestley's " Institutes of Natural and 
Revealed Religion," and Beattie's " Essay on Truth," which 
confirmed my disposition to metaphysical inquiries, and War- 
burton's " Divine Legation," which delighted me more than any 
book I had yet read, and which perhaps tainted my mind with a 
fondness for the twilight of historical hypothesis, but which 
certainly inspired me with that passion for investigating the his- 
tory of opinions which has influenced my reading through life. 
At the college he formed an intimacy with a most engaging and 
promising youth, Robert Hall, who afterwards became the most 
brilliant preacher of his age. " His society and conversation 
had a great influence on my mind ; our controversies were almost 
unceasing. We lived in the same house, and we were both very 
disputatious. He led me to the perusal of Jonathan Edwards's 
book on Free Will, which Dr. Priestley had pointed out before. 
I am sorry that I never got the other works of that most ex- 
traordinary man, who, in a metaphysical age or country, would 
certainly have been deemed as much the boast of America as 
his great countryman Franklin." In their joint studies the two 
youths read much of Xenophon and Herodotus and more of 
Plato ; and so well was this known — exciting admiration in some, 
in others envy — that it was not unusual, as they went along, for 
their class-fellows to point at them and say : " There go Plato 
and Herodotus." But the arena in which they met most fre- 
quently was that of morals and metaphysics. " After having 
sharpened their weapons by reading, they often repaired to the 
spacious sands upon the sea-shore, and still more frequently to 
the picturesque scenery on the banks of the Don above the 
old town, to discuss with eagerness the various subjects to which 
their attention had been directed. There was scarcely an im- 



34§ SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH. [Art. xlvi. 

portant position in Berkeley's " Minute Philosopher," or Butler's 
" Analogy," or in Edwards on the Will, over which they had 
not thus debated with the utmost intensity. Night after night, 
nay month after month, for two seasons, they met only to study 
or dispute, yet no unkindly feeling ensued." (Gregory's " Me- 
moir of Robert Hall") 

In 1784 he entered on the study of medicine, and was under 
the famous Dr. Cullen, but attached himself to the fancies of 
John Brown, author of the Brunonian system, which had its lit- 
tle day. At Edinburgh he became a member of the famous Specu- 
lative Society, which did so much to stimulate the intellectual 
life of young men. He is able to testify of Edinburgh Univer- 
sity, " that it is not easy to conceive a university where industry 
was more general, where reading was more fashionable, and 
where indolence and ignorance were more disreputable. Every 
mind was in a state of fermentation. The direction of mental 
activity will not indeed be universally approved. It certainly 
was very much, though not exclusively, pointed towards meta- 
physical inquiries." To the " Royal Physical Society," he read 
a paper on the instincts and dispositions of animals, and showed 
that animals had memory, imagination, and reason in different 
degrees ; declining to enter on the difficult question : " To what 
circumstance are we to attribute the intellectual superiority of 
man over other animals ? " He took his medical degree with 
credit, but it does not appear that he ever had the taste for the 
patient observation of physiological facts which would have made 
him eminent in the profession. It is quite clear that, while a 
hard student, he mingled freely in the excesses for which the 
Edinburgh lawyers and students were noted at that period. It 
is proper to add that, when in Edinburgh, he attended the 
lectures of Dugald Stewart, with whom he carried on an occa- 
sional correspondence through life. 

He was now seized with the disposition attributed to his 
countrymen of going south when they have to seek a settlement 
for life, and he went to London in the spring of 1788. There 
he meant to follow the medical profession, but he was easily 
turned aside from it. He became deeply interested in the poli- 
tics of the time, which took their direction from the revolt of 
the American colonies, and from the fermentation preceding the 
revolutionary outburst in France. He listened eagerly to the 



Art. xlvi.] HIS EARLY PUBLICATIONS. 349 

orations of Burke and Sheridan ; and became a speaker him- 
self in one of the numerous political societies of the period. 
He was led by his social dispositions to mingle in the society 
that was open to him. " His company was sought after, and 
few were the occupations which induced him willingly to decline 
a pleasant invitation." Feeling a difficulty in sustaining him- 
self, he sold his little highland estate, and bravely entered into 
the state of matrimony. He now betook himself to the study 
of the law, and, had he kept to it steadily, would undoubtedly 
have risen to great eminence in certain departments of it re- 
quiring thought and lofty eloquence. But an opportunity now 
presented itself to call forth his special gifts, and enable him at 
once to rise to distinction. 

About this time there was a wide difference of opinion in 
England in regard to the tendency and influence of the French 
Revolution. Young minds of a liberal tendency were strongly 
impressed with the need of political reformation in France. 
But, as the revolution advanced, not a few who at first favored 
it became alarmed at the infidelity and the cruel excesses. 
Burke, in particular, denounced the whole movement in language 
of extraordinary power and eloquence in his " Reflections." 
But multitudes were not disposed to abandon the hope which 
they cherished. Many were the replies to Burke, but they were 
all feeble compared with that now issued, in April, 1791 , — the 
"Vindiciae Gallicse," by Mackintosh. The work has not the 
magnificent glow of Burke ; but it is philosophical and eloquent, 
and had a rapid and wide circulation. At a later date, when 
some Frenchmen at Paris complimented him on the " Vindiciae 
Gallicae," he replied : " Messieurs, vous m'avez si bien refute." 

In 1795 he was called to the bar, and gradually acquired a 
considerable practice. But his native tendency was still toward 
speculation, and in 1799 he delivered a course of thirty-nine 
" Lectures on the Law of Nature and Nations." This work 
does not exhaust the grand topic of which it treats ; but it was 
a most important contribution to the science of natural and in- 
ternational law, and furnished ample evidence of the eminently 
philosophical mind of the author. " The foundation of moral 
government and its tests he examined at great length and with 
much acuteness ; he entered into a question which, many years 
after, received from him almost as much elucidation as can be 



350 SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH. [Art. xlvi. 

hoped, — the relation of conscience and utility as the guides 
of moral conduct ; he showed the vanity of every system that 
would sacrifice the particular affections to general benevolence ; 
the origin and use of rules and of habits to the moral being." Parr 
wrote him a characteristic letter : " You dog, nobody can do it 
better ; nobody I say, — not Hume, not Adam Smith, not Burke, 
not Dugald Stewart ; and the only exception I can think of is 
Lord Bacon. Yet, you dog, I hate you, for you want decision. 
O Jimmy ! feel your own powers, assert your dignity, out upon 
vanity and cherish pride." In writing to Dugald Stewart about the 
state of philosophical opinion at this time (1802), he says : " One 
might give a just account of the state of learning at Paris, by 
saying that the mathematical and physical sciences were very 
actively and successfully cultivated, polite literature neglected, 
erudition extinct, and that moral and political speculation were 
discountenanced by the government and had ceased to interest 
the public." " Germany is metaphysically mad. France has 
made some poor efforts which have ended in little more than 
the substitution of the word ideology for metaphysics." 

His next great effort was his defence of M. Peltier, an 
emigrant royalist, for a libel on Napoleon Bonaparte, at that 
time first consul of France. His oration is regarded by some 
as one of the most eminent displays of forensic eloquence which 
modern times have produced. But he has now to consider two 
very important points, — one is how he is to execute what he in- 
tends to make his life-work, and the other is how is he to get a living 
suited to his tastes and habits. He has all along been cherishing 
ambitious literary projects, not always very clearly defined, 
but pointing towards a great work on moral philosophy and a 
history of England or certain eras of it. But these schemes 
could not very well be carried into execution by one who had to 
toil at the bar. And then he was fond of society, and had not 
sufficient moral restraint to curb expenditure. In these circum- 
stances he was led to accept (1804) the office of Recorder of 
Bombay, which was handsomely offered by the tory govern- 
ment, and he became Sir James Mackintosh. He thought he 
would now be able to undertake and complete, as he expressed 
it, " my intended work on morals and politics, which I consider 
as the final cause of my existence." But his hopes were not 
realized. He had not sufficient decision to contend with the re- 



Art. xl vi.] LIFE TN INDIA. 35 1 

laxing influence of the climate. " Our climate may be endured : 
but I feel that, by its constant though silent operation, ex- 
istence is rendered less joyous and even less comfortable. I see 
around me no extraordinary prevalence of disease, but I see no 
vigorous cheerful health." He longed for letters from England 
and wrote letters to his friends which are full of thought. 
" Philosophy is my trade, though I have hitherto been but a 
poor workman, I observe you touch me with the spur once or 
twice about my book on morals ; I felt it gall me, for I have not 
begun ; and I shall not make any promises to you till I can say 
that it is well begun : but I tell you what has either really or 
apparently to myself retarded me ; it was the restless desire of 
thoroughly mastering the accursed German philosophy." " It is 
vain to despise them. Their opinions will, on account of their 
number and novelty, occupy more pages in the history of phi- 
losophy than those of us humble disciples of Locke and Hartley. 
Besides, their abilities are not really contemptible. It seems to 
me that I am bound not only to combat these new adversaries, 
but to explain the principle and ground of their hostility, which 
isin itself a most curious confutation in detail." 

He discharges the duties of his office, and instituted the Lit- 
erary Society at Bombay and had a plan for forming a compare 
ative vocabulary of Indian languages, read a great number and 
variety of books, and often writes critiques upon them, some 
of them distinguished by great ability and worthy of being pre- 
served in a more permanent form than in the memoir written by 
his son. In philosophy, he reads Reinhold, Tiedemann, and says : 
"I shall begin with Descartes' ' Meditations ' and 'Objections/ 
Spinoza, Hobbes on ' Human Nature,' Berkeley's ' Principles' 
and ' Dialogues,' Hume on ' Human Nature/ then Kant." 
" The German philosophy, under its present leader Schelling, has 
reached a degree of darkness in comparison of which Kant 
was noonday. Kant, indeed, perplexed all Europe ; but he is 
now disdainfully rejected by his countrymen as a superficial 
and popular writer " ! While engaged in this reading, he says : 
" My nature would have been better consulted, if I had been 
placed in a quieter situation, where speculation might have been 
my business, and visions of the fair and good my chief recre- 
ation." I venture to affirm that, if he had been placed in 
such a position, he would not have remained in it a month. He 



35 2 SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH. [Art. xlvi. 

remembers the feelings and projects of his youth, when "my 
most ardent ambition was to have been a professor of moral 
philosophy." He writes to Dugald Stewart : " I am now em- 
ployed in attempting to throw into order some speculations, on 
the origin of our notions of space and time, of poor Tom Wedg- 
wood." " I am very desirous of seeing what you say on the 
theory of ethics. I am now employed on what the Germans 
have said on that subject. They agree with you in rejecting 
the doctrine of personal or public interest, and in considering 
the moral principle as an ultimate law. I own to you that I am 
not a whit more being a Kantian than I was before ; yet I 
think much more highly of Kant's philosophical genius than I 
did when I less comprehended his writings." He reads one 
hundred pages of Fichte's Lectures on " The Characteristic 
Features of the present Age," " a very ingenious book with most 
striking parts." " Finished Fichte, — a book, certainly, of ex- 
traordinary merit, but so mysterious and dogmatical as to be 
often unintelligible and often offensive. Read one hundred 
pages of Kieswetter's ' Introduction to the Kantian Philos- 
ophy.' It is the first clear book on this subject which I have 
seen." I have given so many extracts from his journal and let- 
ters, because they exhibit so vividly the process through which 
in that age many a young mind had to pass, in trying to cross 
from the British to the German philosophy. 

Thus did he pass eight years of his life. He returned to 
England in 1812 ; and, as his opinions had undergone consider- 
able modification since he wrote against Burke, he had flattering 
political offers from Perceval and Canning. But he conscien- 
tiously stuck by his whig friends and whig principles. He was 
soon in the whirl of London society, the charms of which he 
could not resist. He and Madame de Stael became for a sea- 
son the most brilliant conversers in the literary and political 
circles. " She treats me as the person whom she most delights 
to honor : I am generally ordered with her to dinner, as one 
orders beans and bacon ; I have in consequence dined with her 
at the houses of nearly all the cabinet ministers." Through 
the influence of his whig friends, he became M. P. for the 
County of Nairn, and in the House of Commons promoted 
every liberal measure, and, from time to time, made speeches of 
a very high order, — in thought, expression, in tone, far above the 



Art. xlvi.] WASTES HIS ENERGIES. 353 

ordinary level of statesmen. He also wrote miscellaneous arti- 
cles in the " Edinburgh Review." But what of his cherished 
work ? He had not formally abandoned it. But he had not the 
courage to resist the pleasures of society, and the excitement 
of politics, and devote himself to what he knew to be his 
proper sphere. 

Two opportunities presented themselves for returning to his 
favorite philosophic pursuits. In 1818 he was appointed pro- 
fessor of law and general politics in the college instituted for 
the education of the civil servants of the East India Company 
at Haileybury. There he treated of moral science, dividing it 
into ethics and jurisprudence ; and of law, civil, criminal, and 
constitutional. He did not commit his lectures to writing, and 
nothing is preserved of them but the barest outline. Another 
opportunity, and the last, presented itself. On the death of 
Thomas Brown in May, 1820, he was offered the chair of moral 
philosophy, in the university of Edinburgh. It was the very 
place for him. He would have been one of the three mighty 
men in the capital of Scotland, the others being Walter 
Scott and Francis Jeffrey. He would have been constrained 
to complete his philosophical reading, and thoroughly work 
out his system, and might have left works worthy of being 
ranked with those of Reid, Stewart, and Hamilton, though not 
equal to the first and last of these in originality. But he is 
sucked back into the amenities of London society and the agi- 
tations of politics. 

He was the favorite of every society he entered, by his good- 
nature, his urbanity, his extensive knowledge, his keen sense 
of the ludicrous, his pleasant humor, his good-natured wit, 
and his profound wisdom. As a parliamentary orator, he was 
thoughtful, always thoughtful ; and thoughtful hearers were 
pleased to notice that he was evidently thinking as he spoke. 
His speeches had also the charm of elegant diction and brill- 
iant illustration. But for popular effect they were too candid, 
and wanted coarseness, invective, satire, and passion. His 
whig friends never made him a member of the cabinet, and 
Sir James Scarlet commented : " There is a certain degree of 
merit which is more convenient for reward than the highest." 
The students of Glasgow University paid him an appropriate 
honor when they elected him lord rector. At length he set 

23 



354 SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH. [Art. xlvl 

himself vigorously to write a history of England. The work 
is calm, candid, full of fine generalizations and analyses of char- 
acter ; but wants liveliness of narrative, and a searching detec- 
tion of motives, especially bad motives, — he was too charitable, 
or, rather, too genial, to believe in human wickedness. His 
greatest work might have been a " History of the Revolution 
in England," as he had such a sympathy with the wisdom and 
moderation of the event ; but he left the book unfinished. He 
was persuaded with some difficulty to write a " Dissertation of 
the Progress of Ethical Philosophy," for a new edition of the 
" Encyclopaedia Britannica." He took an active part in promot- 
ing Catholic emancipation and the Reform Bill. He was now 
evidently hastening to fulfil the grand work which he had al- 
lotted to himself. But he was seized with illness ere he com- 
pleted it. He had not identified himself much with the religion 
of Jesus in his life, but he turned to it at his dying hours. His 
son reports : " He would speak of God with more reverence 
and awe than I have almost ever met with." " Our Lord 
Jesus was very frequently the subject of his thoughts ; he 
seemed often perplexed and unable to comprehend much of 
his history. He once said to me : ' It is a great mystery to me, 

— I cannot understand it.' " " His difficulty lay in the account 
given of the manner in which he became the Saviour of men." 
" I said to him at one time : ' Jesus Christ loves you ; ' he an- 
swered slowly arid pausing between each word : ' Jesus Christ 

— love — the same thing.' After a long silence, he said: 'I 
believe — ' We said, in a voice of inquiry: 'In God?' He 
answered : ' In Jesus.' He spoke but once more after this." 

We have very imperfect means of knowing what his philoso- 
phy would have been had he fully formed it. We can judge of 
it only by the skeleton of his lectures at Haileybury, preserved 
in the Memoir, and by his historical and critical dissertation in 
the Encyclopaedia. He has a clear idea of the end to be served 
by ethical science : " Not what is, but what ought to be. Here 
a new world opens on the mind : the word, the idea, ought has 
no resemblance to any object of natural science ; no more than 
colors to sound, not so much. Both are phenomena. The 
question by what rules the voluntary actions of men ought to 
be governed. This important word ought, which represents no 
fact, is yet intelligible to all mankind ; a correspondent term in 



Art. xlvi.] HIS ETHICAL DISSERTATION. 355 

every language, — the terms ' right,' ' wrong/ ' moral,' ' immoral,' 
' duty,' ' crime,' ' virtue,' ' vice,' ' merit,' 4 demerit,' distinguished 
and contrasted." He has evidently kept three ends before him 
in his " Dissertation : " The progress of the science, especially 
during the two previous centuries ; a critical examination of 
the more eminent ethical writers ; and an exposition of his 
own views. These three ends are not kept separate, but run 
through the whole work. We may first take a cursory view 
of the historical exposition, and then critically examine his own 
theory. 

He has a retrospect of ancient ethics. His sketches are not 
equal to those of Adam Smith in his " Theory of Moral Senti- 
ments," but are worthy of being placed near them. They are 
not very erudite or very profound, but they are by no means 
superficial. He can sketch admirably the practical tendency 
of a philosophic system such as that of the Stoics. He has 
then a retrospect of scholastic ethics. It could scarcely be 
expected of a whig that he should have much reverence for 
mediaeval times ; but, in his treatment of the schoolmen, he is 
appreciative in the highest degree of their excellencies. It is 
evident that he has not that thorough acquaintance with their 
discussions and individual opinions which later research on the 
part of historians of philosophy and of the church might have 
enabled him to attain. He enters on a more congenial theme 
when he comes to modern times. 

He begins with Grotius and Hobbes, of both of whom he has 
a high admiration, but remarks of Hobbes' system, that "a 
theory of man which comprehends in its explanations neither 
the social affections nor the moral sentiments must be owned to 
be sufficiently defective." He then enters on the controversies 
concerning the moral faculties and social affections, and gives 
a critical exposition of Cumberland, Cudworth, Clarke, Shaftes- 
bury, Bossuet, Fenelon, Leibnitz, Malebranche, Edwards, and 
Buffier. He has formed a higher estimate of the merits of 
Edwards than most Europeans, whether British or German. 
He had studied the " Treatise on the Will " when a student in 
Aberdeen, and he favors the view taken by Edwards that vir- 
tue consists in love to being as being, according as being has 
claims on it. But whence the claims of being ? An answer to 
this question must bring us, whether we wish or no, to an ethi- 



356 SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH. [Art. xlvt. 

cal principle guiding the direction and flow of the affection. 
The discussion by Edwards is certainly a very profound one, 
and he brings out deep truths of which Mackintosh did not 
discover the importance. 

He goes on to men who are represented as laying the foun- 
dations of a more just theory of ethics ; that is, as approaching 
nearer the theory of Mackintosh. He gives just and valuable 
accounts of the systems of Butler, Hutcheson, Berkeley, Hume, 
Smith, Price, Hartley, Tucker, Paley, Bentham, Stewart, and 
Brown. He perhaps, exaggerates the originality of Butler, who 
was much indebted to Shaftesbury, but passed far beyond him 
in maintaining the supremacy of conscience. " In these ser- 
mons he has taught truths more capable of being exactly 
distinguished from the doctrines of his predecessors, more 
satisfactorily established by him, more comprehensively applied 
to particulars, more rationally connected with each other, and, 
therefore, more worthy of the name of discovery, than any with 
which we are acquainted ; if we ought not, with some hesitation, 
to accept the first steps of Grecian philosophy towards a theory 
of morals." Mackintosh does not seem to be aware that, lofty as 
was Berkeley's idealism in its moral tone, his ethical system is 
based on pleasure as the ultimate good. " Sensual pleasure is the 
summum boniim. This is the great principle of morality. This 
once rightly understood, all the doctrines, even the severest of 
the gospels, may clearly be demonstrated. Sensual pleasures, 
qua pleasure, is good and desirable by a wise man. But if it be 
contemptible, 'tis not qtcd pleasure, but qua pain, or (which is the 
same thing) of loss of greater pleasure." (" Berkeley's Works, 
by Fraser, vol. iv. 457). He has a great admiration of Hartley, 
but points out his defects. " The work of Dr. Hartley entitled 
' Observations on Man' is distinguished by an uncommon 
union of originality with modesty in unfolding a simple and 
fruitful principle of human nature. It is disfigured by the ab- 
surd affectation of mathematical forms then prevalent ; and it 
is encumbered by a mass of physiological speculations, ground- 
less, or at best uncertain." He was particularly struck with 
the shrewdness and graphic though homely illustrations of 
Tucker, who was always a great favorite with him. He criti- 
cises Bentham at considerable length. He blames him, in 
particular, for maintaining that, " because the principle of utility 



Art. xlvi.] HIS ETHICAL THEORY. 357 

forms a necessary part of every moral theory, it ought therefore 
to be the chief motive of human conduct." But he has not 
seized on the fundamental defect in Bentham's theory, for he 
himself has so far given in to it by reckoning tendency to pro- 
duce happiness as the constituent of virtue. As setting so high a 
value on the social affections, he was specially offended with Mr. 
James Mill, who " derives the whole theory of government from 
the single fact that every man pursues his interest when he 
knows it." 

Altogether, these sketches have not the calm wisdom nor 
some of the other admirable qualities of those drawn by Dugald 
Stewart, who had evidently devoted his life to the study, and 
contemplated the subject on all sides. But they are often 
searching, generally just, and always candid, sympathetic, and 
comprehensive. 

He criticises the ethical writers, as we might expect, by a 
standard of his own, which is ever cropping out, and at the close 
of his dissertation he expounds his own theory. He insists, 
very properly, on a distinction being drawn between the inquiry 
into right and wrong, and into the mental power which discerns 
them. In answer to the first, he maintains that virtue consists 
in beneficial tendency, and to the second that it consists of a 
class of feelings gendered by association. In both these 
points, he goes a step in the descending progress beyond Brown, 
who makes moral good a simple unresolvable quality, and the 
feeling of moral approbation an original one. I propose to 
consider both these points in the reverse order to that which 
he follows. 

(i). He lays down the principle that morality is not affected 
by the way in which we explain the rise of the moral emotion, 
whether we trace it to moral reason, to an original feeling, or to 
association. I am not prepared to give in to this. If it is 
to be ascribed with Brown to mere feeling, it will always be 
competent to argue that the distinction between good and evil 
depends on human temperament, and does not imply an original, 
a necessary, and eternal distinction between good and evil. If 
it is regarded with Mackintosh, as a mere feeling gendered by 
association, then it is simply the product of circumstances, and 
may shift with circumstances. It is vain on this theory to 
appeal, as Mackintosh would wish to do, to conscience as hav- 



35$ SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH. [Art. xlvi, 

ing authority, and supreme authority ; it has merely the author- 
ity of association, and cannot claim the authority of God, or 
even of our essential constitution. I rather think that Mackin- 
tosh would have shrunk from his doctrine, had he foreseen how 
physiologists, by means of heredity and undesigned natural 
selection, manufacture moral feeling out of animal sensations. 
The authority of conscience depends on the source from which 
it is derived. 

According to Brown, conscience is a mere class of feelings, 
and Mackintosh follows him. But Mackintosh makes the feel- 
ings to be gendered by association. In order to support this 
theory, he is obliged to give to association a larger power than 
was given to it even by Brown. He corrects " the erroneous 
but prevalent notion, that the law of association produces 
only such a close union of thought as gives one the power of 
reviving the other ; " and insists that " it forms them into a new 
compound, in which the properties of the component parts are 
no longer discoverable, and which may itself become a substan- 
tive principle of human nature. They supposed the condition, 
produced by its power, to resemble that of material substances 
in a state of mechanical diffusion ; whereas, in reality, it may be 
better likened to a chemical combination of the same substances 
from which a totally new product arises " (Sect. VII). But what 
does he mean by association ? I suppose merely the succession 
of ideas. The laws of the association of ideas are merely the 
laws of their succession. It is quite a straining of the word 
to give association the power of creating a new idea. We place 
oxygen and hydrogen in a certain relation to each other, and 
water is the product ; and the water possesses properties not 
discernible in the elements separately. But chemists do not 
ascribe this to the mere association of the two : they derive it 
from the properties of the oxygen and the hydrogen. In like 
manner when a new idea springs up, we are not to attribute it 
to the association of feelings, but to a property of the feelings, — 
a property proceeding from a power actual or potential. We 
have thus to go back to a power deeper and more fundamental, 
and to get a source of ideas, not in mere association, but in the 
intellectus ipse of Leibnitz, or in the feelings themselves ; and 
this is the moral power. 

(2). If we thus prove that there is an original moral faculty 



Art. xl vi.] HIS ETHICAL THEORY. 359 

of the nature of moral perception, discerning between good 
and evil, we are in a position to settle the further question : 
Whether virtue can be resolved into benevolence ? Mackintosh 
stands up for the existence and authority of conscience as a 
class of feelings. He holds that our business is to follow con- 
science, even when we do not see the consequences of the acts 
we perform. But what is the common quality in the acts which 
conscience approves of ? He maintains that, in the last resort, 
it is beneficial tendency which distinguishes virtuous acts, and 
dispositions from those which we call vicious. He allows that 
the virtuous man may not see the beneficial consequences of 
the acts he performs, that the man who speaks truth may never 
think that to speak truth leads to happiness : he does it simply 
because it is right. Still, if we inquire into it, it will be found 
that beneficial tendency is the essential quality in virtuous acts. 
I dispute this statement, appealing to conscience as the arbiter. 
For conscience affirms that justice, that veracity, that candor, 
are good, quite as much so as benevolence itself, and it is diffi- 
cult, I believe impossible, to resolve justice and the virtues 
embraced under it, such as veracity and the love of truth, into 
benevolence. 

Altogether Sir James Mackintosh never fulfilled the expecta- 
tions that were formed by Robert Hall and his other friends. 
He went from medicine to law, and from law to politics ; and 
with first-rate intellectual powers, failed to reach the highest 
positions in any one of these departments. He was without 
firmness of purpose to resist temptation and concentrate his 
energies on what he acknowledged to be his life-work, and so 
was at the mercy of circumstances, and attained the highest 
eminence only as a talker in the best social circles of London, 
where he had a perpetual stimulus to excel. If he had only had 
the courage to devote himself to what he knew to be his forte, 
but which could not bring him immediate fame ; had he read 
systematically, instead of discursively, and made himself as well 
acquainted with the higher forms of the Greek and German 
philosophy, as he did with the later forms and of British phi- 
losophy, — he might have ranked with the highest thinkers of his 
age. As it is he has left us little that will endure beyond these 
able and candid sketches of ethical writers. 



360 HENRY (LORD) BROUGHAM. [Art. xlvii. 



XLVII. — HENRY (LORD) BROUGHAM. 1 

Lord Brougham was born in Scotland, was the son of a Scotch mother, 
was trained in the Scotch metaphysics, and employed them with advantage 
in his work on natural theology, and was swayed by them, often uncon- 
sciously, in his addresses at scientific associations, in his speeches, his 
sketches of statesmen and philosophers, and in his legal opinions and deci- 
sions which, when they relate to moral themes, are evidently founded on 
sound ethical principles, caught from Stewart and the Scottish professors. 
We are therefore entitled to claim him as belonging to the fraternity. 

He was born in Edinburgh, September, 1779. His father was Henry 
Brougham, of Brougham Hall, Westmoreland, who came to Edinburgh 
after the death of his first wife, and there married Eleanor Lyme, a niece of 
Principal Robertson, the historian. He was educated at the high school 
of Edinburgh, where he early showed his great capacity and his power of 
application. At the university he devoted himself closely and system- 
atically to higher learning, and at times took excessive fits of study. If 
tradition speaks true, he had also fits of drinking, from the visible effects 
of which he was kept by his strong mind and bodily constitution. He 
attended Dugald Stewart's lectures; and we see traces of a happy influence 
produced on his restless temper by the calm, moral wisdom of that true 
philosopher and great teacher. But he was specially addicted to physical 
and mathematical studies, and profited greatly by the instructions of Play- 
fair, Black, and Robison. " Great as was the pleasure and solid advantage 
of studying under such men as Playfair and Stewart, the gratification of 
attending one of Black's last courses exceeded all I ever enjoyed." At a 
very early age, from sixteen to twenty, he had papers on optics and porisms 
inserted in the " Philosophical Transactions " of Edinburgh. He acquired 
at this time an immense body of information which he turned to profitable 
use as a pleader and a statesman, and which greatly increased his useful- 
ness. No doubt his admirers ascribed to him, and he probably ascribed to 
himself, a larger amount of learning than he really possessed : still he had 
attained and mastered a vast amount of real knowledge. He continued all 
his life an ardent and laborious student ; and he had laid, in his college 
days, a solid foundation on which to build his acquirements. 

He became, as we might expect, a stirring member of the Speculative 
Society, which at that time embraced, among its younger members, Jef- 
frey, Horner, Murray, Moncreiff, Miller, Loch, Adam, Cockburn, Jardine, 
Charles (afterwards Lord) Kinnaird, Lord Webb Seymour, and at a some- 
what later date the two Grants, Glenelg and his brother Sir Robert. 
" After the day's work we would adjourn to the Apollo Club, where the 
orgies were more of the ' high jinks ' than of the calm or philosophical 
debating order, or to Johnny Dow's, celebrated for oysters. Sometimes, if 
not generally, these nocturnal meetings had endings that in no small de- 

1 The Life and Times of Henry Lord Brougham, written by himself. 



Art. xl vii.] AS AN ORATOR. 361 

gree disturbed the tranquillity of the good town of Edinburgh" He 
became a member of the Society of Advocates in 1800, and in 1808 he was 
called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn, London. The profession was at first 
distasteful to him in the highest degree, but he soon got reconciled to it when 
it brought him into scenes of excitement, as when he became counsellor to the 
Princess Caroline, and earned such fame by his defence of her. 

There would be no propriety in our entering into the details of his Lon- 
don life, where he espoused the liberal side in politics, became member of 
parliament, and compelled all men to acknowledge at once that he was a de- 
bater of extraordinary power. His eloquence was of a very marked kind, — 
full, elaborate, yet pointed and telling. His sentences were complex, often 
taking in a mighty sweep of arguments and facts ; and people wondered 
how he was ever to get out of the labyrinth in which he had involved 
himself, but in the end he always came out perspicuous. His clear arrange- 
ment of a difficult subject, the fulness of his information, gained the judg- 
ment, while his massive language made the whole argument come down 
with the power of a sledge-hammer, His speeches did resemble thunder 
quite as much as those of any modern orator ; and if Demosthenes " ful- 
mined " over Greece, Brougham k 'fulmined" over Westminster Hall and 
St. Stephen's, and popular meetings all over England. His sarcasm was 
very biting and his invective terrific, and the effect was increased by a 
nervous curl of the lip, resembling the snarl of a dog. He had every quality 
of a great orator except tenderness and pathos. 

He was a powerful (the most powerful in his day) advocate of every 
measure of reform, political and social. He uttered the most withering 
denunciations of slavery ; he advocated law reform, and parliamentary 
reform, and took a deep interest in education and in all social ques- 
tions, — becoming president of the Social Science Congress. But perhaps 
his greatest work was the formation of the Society for the Diffusion of 
Useful Knowledge, which did so much to extend a knowledge of literature 
and science and promote reading among the people. 

His vast powers, however, were greatly marred by certain weaknesses. 
He was impelled by a fiery intellect to constant labor, and was often busy 
when he might have carried his point more effectively by retiring. He was 
intensely fond of popular applause, — partly through his sympathy with man- 
kind, and often sought fame in quarters where he got only infamy. All this 
wrought in him a restlessness and an inequality of temper ; and his party, 
even his friends, complained that they could not trust him. When the Whigs 
carried the Reform Bill he was made Lord Chancellor, — unfortunately for 
himself, for he had not all the qualities necessary to make a dignified and 
a wise supreme judge in a great country with such complicated interests. 
His predecessor, Lord Eldon, had hesitated and delayed in his judgments, 
so that there was an immense accumulation of undecided cases ; and 
Brougham cleared them all off in an amazingly brief time. Many of his 
decisions were reckoned rash by the wisest lawyers ; but his opinions in all 
cases involving equity — in which he had been instructed by his ethical 
training in Edinburgh — will ever be reckoned of great value. As he had 
excessive self-will and little prudence, his colleagues were in a constant 



362 HENRY (LORD) BROUGHAM. [Art. xlvii. 

state of alarm as to what he might do next. They felt that he was dragging 
the Great Seal through the dirt in a tour which he took through Scotland, 
receiving congratulations from quarters which did not add to his dignity. 1 
At one of his meetings he boasted that he would write that evening to his 
sovereign, King William, telling him how great was the honor which had 
been conferred on him. His colleagues took advantage of the occasion to 
ipartwith hin^, and henceforth he held a somewhat ambiguous position in 
political life ; cast off by the liberals and not willing to join the tories, not- 
withstanding his excessive admiration of the Duke of Wellington and Lord 
Lyndhurst. Still he led a useful life, helping on every educational cause, 
such as Mechanics' Institutes and the London University. 

He was elected, as so many eminent men have been, lord rector of 
Glasgow University, and delivered, in 1825, a very able and elaborate de- 
fence of learning ; but declared that man is no more responsible for his 
belief than for the color of his skin. He may have imagined that the sup- 
porters of Calvinism would not frown on such a doctrine ; but he was 
immediately met by Chalmers, Wardlaw, and a host of others, who could 
not stand such a perversion of the doctrine of necessity, and who showed 
that the will had much to do with the formation of opinions, for which man, 
therefore, was responsible, if not to his neighbors, at least to God. 

Prompted by a boundless ambition and activity of mind, he threw him- 
self into an infinite number and variety of works, in no one of which, 
except oratory, did he reach the highest eminence. He continued to culti- 
vate science, physical and mathematical, but had not leisure nor patience 
to widen the boundaries of any one department. He wrote innumerable 
articles and papers, especially sketches of statesmen and philosophers. 
These are always able, candid, kindly, but are deficient in delicate appre- 
ciation of character and motive. In his later years he employed a portion 
of his time in writing an autobiography. 

He had been all along an able defender of the great truths of natural 
religion. He had spoken with reverence of the scriptures, and delighted to 
show that the theology of nature had sustained revelation. But it was only 
in his later days that he seemed thoroughly to bow down before God. It 
is believed that he was much affected by a change which had taken place 
in the character of Lord Lyndhurst, whose clear and sharp intellect he so 
much admired. Certain it is that in old age he gave forth utterances which 
show that he was thoroughly penetrated with the importance of divine 
realities. He spent a good deal of his later life at Cannes, and died there 
May 9, 1868. 

I believe that there is a philosophy underlying most of the criticisms, 

1 He was to be received at Brechin in the parish church. He separated from 
those who were to conduct him, and came to the door in tartan trews, and was 
refused entrance by an old sergeant who had charge of the admission. "Do not 
you know," thundered his lordship, "that an order of mine could hang you on 
that lamp-post ? " To which the sergeant replied that he knew nothing as to what 
the person addressing him could do, but he knew that it was his duty not to 
allow any one to enter at that door without an express order. 



Art. xlvii.] DISCOURSE ON NATURAL THEOLOGY. 363 

and even the orations, of Brougham. His metaphysical principles espe- 
cially appear in his " Discourse on Natural Theology," prefixed to his 
edition of Paley, a work executed when he held the Great Seal of England. 
This discourse professes to be logical, but does not throw much light on 
the method of inquiry, or on the nexus of the parts of the theistic argu- 
ment. He professes to proceed throughout on the method of Bacon, 
of whom he entertained, as all the Scottish metaphysicians did, a high 
admiration. He maintains that natural theology " is strictly a branch of 
inductive theology, formed and supported by the same kind of reasoning 
upon which the physical and psychological sciences are founded." He 
argues that "the two inquiries, that into the nature and constitution of the 
universe and that into the evidence of design which it displays, are to a 
large extent identical." Turning to psychology, he expresses his wonder 
that writers in modern times have confined themselves to the proofs afforded 
by the visible and sensible works of nature, while the evidence furnished 
by the mind and its operations has been neglected. " The structure of 
the mind, in every way in which we can regard it, affords evidence of the 
most skilful contrivance. All that adapts it so admirably to the operations 
which it performs, all its faculties, are plainly means working to an end." 
He refers in proof to the processes involved in reasoning, association, habit, 
memory, and to the feelings and affections so adapted to their end. In 
speaking of habit, he gives a powerful description of what no doubt was 
his own experience as a speaker. " A practised orator will declaim in 
measured and in various periods ; will weave his discourse into one texture ; 
form parentheses within parentheses ; excite the passions or move to laugh- 
ter ; take a turn in his discourse from an accidental interruption, making it 
the topic of his rhetoric for five minutes to come, and pursuing in like man- 
ner the new illustrations to which it gives rise ; mould his diction with a 
view to attain or to shun an epigrammatic point, or an Ulceration, or a 
discord ; and all this with so much assured reliance on his own powers, and 
with such perfect ease to himself, that he will even plan the next sentence 
while he is pronouncing off-hand the one he is engaged with, adapting each 
to the other, and shall look forward to the topic which is to follow, and £t 
in the close of the one he is handling to be its introducer; nor will any 
auditor be able to discover the least difference between all this and the por- 
tion of his speech he has got by heart or mark the transition from the one 
to the other." I do believe that there is proof of design in the structure of 
a mind that is capable of bringing forth such products ; but to ascribe all 
this to habit while there are a great many other principles involved, argues 
a defective power of mental analysis on the part of our author. He thinks 
to the ordinary argument an addition of great importance remains to be 
made. " The whole reasoning proceeds necessarily upon the assumption 
that there exists a being or thing separate from and independent of matter 
and conscious of its own existence, which we call mind." So he sets him- 
self against materialism. 

He sets no great value on the argument a priori, and examines it, not 
very powerfully, in the form in which it is put by Clarke. He admits, how- 
ever, that, after we have, by the argument a posteriori, "satisfied ourselves 



3^4 JAMES MYLNE. [Art. xlviii. 

of the existence of the intelligent cause, we naturally connect with this cause 
those impressions which we have derived from the contemplation of infinite 
space and endless duration, and hence we clothe with the attributes of im- 
mensity and eternity the awful Being whose existence has been proved by a 
more vigorous process of investigation." Brougham, it is evident, was 
ignorant of the terrible criticism to which the theistic argument had been 
subjected half a century before by Kant, with whose philosophy he seems 
to have been utterly unacquainted. He does not see clearly what Kant had 
proven, that the a priori principle of cause and effect is involved in the 
argument from design. We look on design as an effect, and infer a de- 
signer as a cause, on the principle that every effect has a cause. At the 
same time he treats of cause and effect. " Whence do we derive it ? I 
apprehend only from our consciousness. We feel that we have a will and 
a power ; that we can move a limb, and effect, by our own powers excited 
after our own volition, a change upon external objects. Now from this 
consciousness we derive the idea of power, and we transfer this idea and 
the relation on which it is founded, between our own will and the change 
produced, to the relations between events wholly external to ourselves, 
assuming them to be connected as we feel our volition and our movements 
are mutually connected. If it be said that this idea by no means involves 
that of necessary connection, nothing can be more certain. The whole is 
a question of fact, — of contingent truth." This statement is exposed to 
criticism. Whence this transference of what we feel, or rather the legiti- 
mate application of it, to the objective world? If there be not a necessary 
principle involved, how are we entitled to argue that world-making, of which 
we have no experience, implies a world-maker. He argues in behalf of the 
immortality of the soul, and that it is quite possible to prove a miracle. It 
has to be added that he has some papers on instinct, on which he throws 
no great light, as he had not caught the idea that instinct is the beginning 
of intelligence, and that it is capable, widiin a limited degree, of being cul- 
tivated and made hereditary. 



XLVIII. — JAMES MYLNE. 

It is a curious circumstance that systems of philosophy so like each other 
should have been formed, simultaneously in the end of last century, and 
propounded at the beginning of this, by three men so different in tempera- 
ment as James Mylne of Glasgow, Thomas Brown of Edinburgh, and 
James Mill of London. But the phenomenon can be explained. They 
could not have borrowed from each other, but they felt a common influence. 
All felt that Hume had undermined a great many received principles, that 
Hartley had resolved into association many operations of the mind before 
referred to independent faculties ; all three, but especially Mylne and 



Art. xlviii.] HIS PHILOSOPHY. 365 

Brown, were acquainted with the analyses of Condillac, De Tutt Tracy, 
and the ideologists of France ; and all lived under the reaction against the 
excessive multiplication of first principles by Reid and Stewart. Of the 
three, Brown had the greatest genius and the keenest analytical power ; 
Mill, of London, the greatest tenacity of purpose, of consistency, and in the 
end of influence : but, Mylne, of Glasgow, had quite as much of searching 
ability as either of the others. He died without publishing any philosophic 
work ; but for upwards of forty years he delivered to large classes in Glas- 
gow a course of lectures which set many minds a working. There was 
nothing attractive, certainly nothing stimulating, in his manner, his language, 
or his system ; but the author of this work remembers him, as he lectured 
every winter morning at half-past seven in the dingy old class-room in 
Glasgow College, as the very embodiment and personification of wisdom, 
which had viewed a subject on all sides and looked it through and through. 

He was the son of the Rev. James Mylne, of Kinnaird, near Dundee ; 
was born in the same shire as James Mill of London; was licensed 
to preach in 1779; was soon after ordained as deputy chaplain of 83d 
Foot; and admitted minister of the Abbey Church, Paisley, in 1783. He 
was appointed professor of philosophy in Glasgow College in 1797, resigned 
on the 3d and died on the 21st of September, 1839. His business was to 
preach or provide preachers for the students in the college chapel. The 
students felt his preaching and that of his substitutes to be cold, and re- 
garded him as secretly a rationalist or a Socinian. After the revival of 
evangelical faith in the city of Glasgow under Chalmers, loud complaints 
were uttered as to the doctrine taught in the college chapel. 

Opposed to the national creed of Scotland, and an adherent of liberal 
principles, he was regarded as a dangerous man by the government of the day. 
On Sunday, March 26, 18 15, news came of the escape of Bonaparte from 
Elba, and in the chapel he happened to give out the paraphrase used in the 
Scotch worship, " Behold, he comes ! your leader comes ! " and it was inter- 
preted as a welcome to the restored emperor, and he was subjected to a 
prosecution by the Lord Advocate. He answered with spirit in a pam- 
phlet, " Statement of the Facts connected with a Precognition taken in the 
College on March 30 and 31, 1815." He speaks of Bonaparte as "a man 
whom he had long regarded with sentiments of the deepest abhorrence and 
detestation, not only as the disturber of the peace and happiness of nations, 
but as the greatest enemy to the civil and political liberties of mankind." 

His philosophy was a sufficiently simple one : he made it very clear, and 
he saw no difficulties. There are three, and only three, faculties of the 
mind, — sensation, memory, and judgment. With certain explanations he 
adopts the principle " nihil in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu." 
He sees that it may be necessary to have a separation of the senses usually 
represented as touch, — one sense to receive sensations from solids, and an- 
other from such qualities as heat. He does not get rid of memory so readily 
as Brown and Mill. He opposes the theory of the French philosophers who 
affirm that memory is a mere modification of former impressions, and from 
Hume who makes conceptions differ merely in degrees from sensation. 
The eye, indeed, after long looking at a bright object, when shut retains 



366 JAMES MYLNE. [Art. xlviit. 

the brightness ; but this, he argues, is a proof that memory is not a sensa- 
tion, for frequently, at the very time the spectrum, as it is called, remains in 
the eye, we can remember that it is not the same. He is obliged to make 
judgment a separate faculty ; but then it consists merely in perceiving the 
difference of feelings. He starts the question, whether our ideas are images 
of external objects, and answers that external objects are rather pictures of 
our sensations. He distinguishes between ideas and sensations. An idea 
is a feeling in the mind which it has distinguished and recognized as differ- 
ent from the other feelings, and a feeling becomes an idea as soon as this 
distinction is made. 

It seems to him easy to explain all the operations of the mind by these 
three faculties. He accounts for attention by showing that some of our 
sensations and feelings are more strong and lively than others. He thinks 
the laws of association may be reduced to two, — contiguity and (taking the 
hint from Stewart) relationship. As most of our perceptions are furnished 
in combinations, no wonder that they are again brought together before the 
mind in combination. But the associations of relationship are much more 
numerous than those of contiguity. Abstraction is nothing more than 
the attention directed in a particular way. He explains the peculiarity of 
habit by the circumstance that, by the frequent repetition of an action, we 
become acquainted with all the means necessary towards its accomplish- 
ment. This is surely not the whole truth, for habit is often carried on without 
any exercise of will ; but there may be some truth in his idea that there 
may be volitions which are not remembered. Feelings are nothing but 
modifications of sensation, — the effect of sensations. Conscience is a deci- 
sion of the judgment, accompanied in many cases by strong and vivid emo- 
tions. Desire is the conception of an object as good, as absent, and as 
attainable. He succeeds in this cool way to account for all the deeper and 
higher acts and ideas of the mind ; but it is by simply overlooking their 
peculiar and distinguishing properties. 

He dwells at length on principles of action. The ultimate principle is a 
desire to secure pleasure and avoid pain. He traces the intellectual oper- 
ation of conception in all affections and passions, following out the Stoic 
resolution of passion as developed by the representative of Stoicism in 
Cicero's "Tusculan Disputations" (lib. iv.), 1 and by which they thought that 
passion might be brought thoroughly under the control of judgment by a 
proper regulation of the conception. The Stoic moralists and Mylne did ser- 
vice to philosophy by giving the proper place to the idea or conception ; but 
then he does not see that the conception must be of something appetible 
or inappetible, derived from a spring of action in the heart or will. He has 
a good division of the affections into: i. Those in which the object of 
them is regarded as in possession, including joy and all its modifications ; 
2. Those in which the object is absent, though attainable : this produces 
desire ; 3. Those in which the object either already attained, or about to 
be attained, is produced by ourselves, which produces self-satisfaction ; 

1 Laetitia autem et libido in bonorum opinione versatur, &c. 



Art. xlix.] JOHN YOUNG. 367 

4. Those in which the agency of others is concerned, giving rise to affec- 
tion and esteem. 

He held firmly by the doctrine of philosophical necessity in its sternest 
and most unrelenting form. Altogether, he had much of the character of 
an old Stoic philosopher, but without those lofty ideas about following 
nature and the will and decree of God which elevated the systems of Zeno, 
Cleanthes, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. 



XLIX. — JOHN YOUNG} 

Two pupils of Professor Mylne's created and sustained for a number of 
years a strong taste for mental science in the Irish province of Ulster, 
from which the founder of the Scottish philosophy had come. These were 
professors in the Belfast College, which imparted a high and useful educa- 
tion to the young men of the north-east of Ireland for a considerable num- 
ber of years, and till it gave way to Queen's College, Belfast. One of 
these was John Young, professor of moral philosophy, and the other Wil- 
liam Cairns, professor of logic and belles-lettres. 

John Young was the son of a seceder elder, and was born in Rutherglen 
in the neighborhood of Glasgow in 1781. He early showed, in the midst of 
business pursuits, a taste for reading of a high order, for composition, and 
for spouting. He had difficulties in getting a learned education ; but he 
taught a school, became a clerk in a bleach-field in the neighborhood, and 
then in a mercantile house in Glasgow ; and struggled on, as many a Scotch 
youth has done, till in 1808, at the age of twenty-seven, he became a student 
in the University of Glasgow, where he distinguished himself in the classes 
of logic and moral philosophy, taught by Professors Jardine and Mylne, 
and took an active part in the college societies, where he displayed, as was 
thought, extraordinary eloquence. He next attended the divinity hall in 
the university, and, losing his faith in the stern principles of the seceders, 
had his thoughts directed towards the ministry in the established 
church. But his destination was fixed when, in 181 5, the spirited inhabi- 
tants of Belfast set up the Belfast Academical Institution, embracing a col- 
lege. Mr. Young, on the recommendation of the Glasgow professors, was 
appointed professor of moral philosophy. 

Belfast was at that time a much smaller place than it is now, but a place 
of great enterprise ; and among its merchants, its flax spinners, its linen 
manufacturers, and its ministers of religion, it had a body, if not of very 
refined yet of very intelligent men, many of them inclined to the Unitarian, 
or non-subscribing faith ; and these men desired to have a good education 

1 "Lectures on Intellectual Philosophy, by the late John Young, with a Me- 
moir of the Author, edited by William Cairns." 



3^8 JOHN YOUNG. [Art. xlix. 

for their sons, and were proud of the pleasant, the accomplished, and pub- 
lic-spirited man who now came to live among them. His manners were 
genial ; he had acquired a very varied knowledge ; he was a ready and in- 
structive talker and an eloquent speaker. The consequence was that he 
became a favorite in the best society of the place, and, it is to be added, 
spent too much of his time in dining out, and in entertaining the citizens 
by his humor and his sparkling conversation. 

But he was an able and a most successful teacher, expounding his views 
with great clearness and fire, and creating a taste for the study, even among 
the mercantile classes, but especially among the ministers of religion, sub- 
scribing and non-subscribing, in Ulster. His lectures were at first care- 
fully written out ; but, as years rolled on, he became less dependent on his 
papers, and expanded like a flood on his favorite topics, and had difficulty 
in compressing his superabundant matter in the limited course allowed him. 
He collected for the college a vast number of books published from the 
time of Locke down to his own day in mental philosophy : these were sub- 
sequently bought by the Queen's College. He continued a popular and 
useful member of society and of his college down to his death, March 9, 
1829. His lectures were edited by his colleague, Dr. Cairns, and published 
in 1834. These published lectures scarcely do justice to him, as they are 
taken from his manuscripts written in the early years of his college life, and 
do not contain the oral illustrations and emendations which he was accus- 
tomed to pour forth from day to day in his class-room. 

At the basis of his whole system, we discover the threefold division of 
the intellectual faculties by Mylne into sensation, memory, and judgment. 
Yet his lectures were of a more quickening and comprehensive character 
than those of his preceptor. We discover, too. that as Dr. Brown's views 
were given to the world, Professor Young grafted many of the living buds 
of that ingenious analyst on the old and drier stock. He is obliged like 
Stewart, and unlike Mylne, — who used to speak of that "undescribed and 
undescribable faculty of the mind " denominated common sense, — to call 
in fundamental laws of belief, and places among these causation and per- 
sonal identity. " Experience itself does not reveal to reason the relation 
of cause and effect." " Cause is not that only which in a particular in- 
stance precedes a change ; but that which, in similar circumstances, we 
believe must always have been followed by a similar change, and will always 
be so followed in future : our belief in the relation of cause and effect thus 
presents us with a universal truth." " The belief is irresistible and is de- 
rived from an instinctive principle in our nature." He says "another 
important idea connected with the fundamental laws of belief is that of 
personal identity." " If we ask why each of us believes in his own iden- 
tity, or regards the feelings which he formerly experienced as belonging to 
the same person which he now calls himself, does not the very statement 
of the question show its absurdity ? Is it not obvious that, even in the 
casual expressions which we employ, we take the fact for granted by the use 
of the pronouns, I and he ? It is to be referred, therefore, to a primary 
law of our nature." 

He dwells fondly on the senses, in the operation of which he took a keen 



Art. l.] WILLIAM CAIRNS. 3^9 

interest. He holds that, in perception, there is involved sensation, memory, 
and judgment. There are sensations ; they are remembered ; and then a 
judgment pronounced that the sensations must have a cause, which cause 
is body. "All our sensations are connected with the conviction of certain 
external things as their cause ; and things which are independent of us, 
because we cannot command their existence by our volition." " We not 
only believe that, in the act of perception, we are conscious of knowing two 
different things, matter and mind, which are at the moment distinct ; but we 
believe that they are permanently distinct and independent." It is not very 
clear to me how he reaches this result. He seems to refer it, like Reid and 
Hamilton, to an original belief. "The belief is of the same kind and 
rests on the same grounds with our belief in the permanence of the laws 
of nature." (Lect. L.) I believe the principle he appeals to, is that of cause and 
effect, and he holds that we are bound by our very constitution to believe that 
every effect has a cause. This might entitle him to argue, by this instinc- 
tive principle of causation, that our sensations, having no cause within the 
mind, must have a cause without the mind ; if indeed we could in such cir- 
cumstances rise to the idea of a without. But he knows that what a cause 
is we must learn from experience ; and from a sensation, which is unextended, 
we could never reach the idea of any thing extended. But our idea of body 
is of something extended ; and we never can reach this except by some 
original perception as is maintained by Reid and Hamilton. He is thus in 
all the difficulties of the inferential theory, in the illogical process of argu- 
ing from something unextended within to an extended existence without. 

He argues powerfully that our knowledge of motion is prior to our knowl- 
edge of extension, and that, in motion, there is implied time and the obser- 
vation of the succession of our thoughts. 



L. — WILLIAM CAIRNS. 

The Belfast College was modelled on the Scotch colleges, and was meant 
to give a liberal education to a large body of students. Dr. Cairns was the 
professor of logic and belles-lettres. He was born in Calton, in the suburbs 
of Glasgow, about 1780-85. His father was so anxious he should be a 
scholar that he carried him in his arms to his first school. He received his 
higher education in the grammar-school and the college of Glasgow, took 
license as a preacher in connection with the secession church about 1804, 
and was ordained a minister in Johnshaven in 1806. From his known intel- 
lectual ability, he was appointed professor of Belfast in 1815, and continued 
to give instruction there till his death in 1848. His knowledge of English 
and classics was extensive, his taste pure and highly refined, and his read- 
ing and elocution of a high order. He was greatly respected by all for his 
talents and accomplishments ; he endeared himself to his friends, and was 

24 



370 JAMES MILL. \K*i. li. 

greatly beloved in his family circle. He took great pains in instructing his 
pupils in the art of English composition, and helped to produce a fine taste 
among the ministers of religion and the educated men of Ulster. His 
nature was too sensitive, and the younger pupils took advantage of this 
infirmity to irritate him and disturb the class. In his later days the insti- 
tution with which he was connected was greatly disquieted by disputes 
between the Trinitarians, who composed the great body of the people, and 
the Unitarians, who had the chief control of the school and college ; and 
Dr. Cairns was often in great perplexity, as he was a man of liberal spirit 
on the one hand, and a firm supporter of evangelical religion on the other. 
The breach was not healed till the institution of Queen's College, in 1849. 

He published an elaborate treatise on " Moral Freedom," 1844. It is 
not easy to give an analysis of it : in fact it is not easy to understand it. 
He starts with the very defective view, for which the teaching of Mylne of 
Glasgow had prepared him, that all the mental phenomena consist of sensa- 
tions and ideas, a doctrine which James Mill of London was contemporane- 
ously turning to a very different purpose. He finds a difficulty in rearing 
his loftier view of man's spiritual nature on such a basis. He dwells fondly 
on a principle of particular reference and comparative survey as the highest 
intellectual exercises, carrying us upward to volition, motive, and moral 
freedom. He is resolute in claiming for man an essential freedom ; and 
opposes Edwards and those divines who, as Chalmers, were connecting the 
philosophical doctrine of necessity with the Scripture doctrine of predesti- 
nation. He regards it as a contracted view to indentify moral freedom 
and freedom of will. He finds moral freedom not in mere volition, but in 
the great influential principle of comparative survey. He unfolds, not very 
clearly, a whole theory of human nature. The truth in his system seems to 
be, that more is involved in moral freedom than mere volition , that the whole 
soul, including the intellect, is involved in it ; and that a preferential feeling, 
as he calls it, is an essential part of it, — pointing to the fact that there may 
be preference or choice not amounting to full volition, but implying respon- 
sibility. He shows that the freedom he advocates may be compatible with 
divine foreknowledge. 



LI. — JAMES MILL} 

The author, as he writes this article, has before him a photo- 
graph of a house which stood at Upper North Water Bridge, 
on the south side of the North Esk River, which there divides 
Angus from Mearns, and flows into the German Ocean a few 
miles below. The house consists of two apartments " a but and 
a ben," with possibly a closet, and a lower addition at one end 

1 " Autobiography by John Stuart Mill ; " " Personal Life of George Grote," 
by Mrs. Grote; &c. 



Art. li.] HIS EARLY LIFE. 3/1 

for a workshop. Here, a hundred years ago, lived a shoemaker, 
named James Mill, with several men under him ; he was also 
a crofter farming some acres of land. His wife was Isabel 
Fenton, said to have been a woman of superior manners and 
intelligence, the daughter of a farmer who was out in the 
"forty-five" on the pretender's side. In this house on April 
6, 1773, was born James Mill, destined to exercise such an 
influence on thought. He was one of a family of three, 
having a brother William, who died young ; and a sister 
Marjory, who married William Greig, who succeeded to her fa- 
ther's trade and left descendants in the district. He seems to 
have been educated at the school of his native parish, Logie-Pert. 
His abilities were discovered by his minister, Rev. Dr. Peter, of 
Logie-Pert, and by Rev. James Foote, 1 of Fettercairn, some miles 
off, where was the family seat of Sir John Stuart, to whose no- 
tice Dr. Foote introduced him ; and he was sent to the university 
of Edinburgh, his son says, " at the expense of a fund established 
by Lady Jane Stuart [the wife of Sir John Stuart], and some 
other ladies for educating young men for the ministry." In the 
university of Edinburgh, he pursued the usual course in arts 
and theology, and attended the lectures of Dugald Stewart. 
We have no account of his student's life or his preacher's life ; 2 
for he became a licentiate of the Church of Scotland. " For a 
few years he was a private tutor in various families in Scotland, 
among others that of the Marquis of Tweeddale." He expect- 
ed, it is said, to receive a presentation to the parish church of 
Craig, which, however, was given to Dr. James Brewster, brother 
to (the afterwards) Sir David Brewster. People may speculate 
as to what sort of minister in faith and practice he would have 
become, had he been settled in that country parish of farmers 
and fishers. 

We may believe that at no time had the ministry of the gos- 
pel any particular charm for him. In the year 1800, he went to 
London, where it is said that he preached in the Presbyterian 
churches. But he soon devoted himself to literature and author- 

1 I had this from a son of Dr. Foote, Archibald Foote, Esq., manufacturer, 
Montrose, to whom John Stuart Mill applied to get information about his father, 
who does not seem to have been very communicative to his family about his par- 
entage or younger years. 

2 It is said that he published two sermons under the name of James Miln or 
Milne. 



372 JAMES MILL. [Art. li. 

ship. We do not know to which of the two strong parties in 
the church of Scotland he had attached himself, whether to the 
moderate or rationalistic, — which Burns and most literary men 
favored, — or to the evangelical, to which Dr. Peter and Mr. 
James Foote belonged. It is not uncommon for Scotchmen, when 
they bury themselves in London, to lose their religious faith, 
which is so sustained by public opinion — as Mill would have said 
by association of ideas — in their native land. With his usual reti- 
cence he has not furnished us with any account of the struggle 
which must have passed in his mind when he abandoned his 
belief, not only in the Bible, but in the very existence of God 
and providence. Such a record would have given us a deeper 
insight into the depths of human nature than all his refined 
metaphysical analyses. If he ever belonged sincerely to the 
evangelical party, there must have been a tremendous revulsion 
of feeling in the change. If he belonged to the moderates, he 
had little to abandon beyond the doctrines of natural religion. 
He married — it is curious that the son never refers to the 
lady — not long after his settlement in London, and when he had 
no resource but the precarious one of writing in periodicals. 
He must have had a hard struggle in these times, but he 
bore it resolutely. A writer in the " Edinburgh Review " (July, 
1873) describes him. "In appearance he was strikingly like 
the portraits of Charles XII. of Sweden, with a lofty forehead, a 
keen and cutting face. His powers of conversation were ex- 
traordinary ; but, both in his family and among his disciples, he 
was to the last degree tyrannical, arbitrary, and impatient of con- 
tradiction." " He was a harsh husband and a stern father." The 
first great literary work planned by him was the " History of 
British India," which he commenced and completed in about 
ten years, and published in 181 7-1 8. In 18 19 the Court of Di- 
rectors of the India Company appointed him to the high post of 
assistant examiner of India correspondence, and he held this 
office till within four years of his death. He wrote articles in 
the " Encyclopaedia Britannica, " on government, education, 
jurisprudence, law of nations, liberty of the press, colonies, 
and prison discipline. He was also a contributor to the " West- 
minster Review," and the " London Review," which after a few 
months was merged in the " London and Westminster." In 
1821-22 he published his " Elements of Political Economy; " in 



Art. li.] HIS INFLUENCE OVER YOUNG MEN. 373 

1829 his "Analysis of the Human Mind;" and in 1835 the 
" Fragment on Mackintosh," being the last work before his death, 
which took place 23d June, 1836. 

For the last fifteen or twenty years of his life he was an im- 
portant member of a thinking and writing circle, he himself 
being the centre of a smaller circle within that circle. In morals 
and politics he attached himself to Bentham, at that time ob- 
noxious in the extreme to many, but adored by a select few. 
" Mr. Bentham, " says Mrs. Grote, " being a man of easy fortune, 
kept a good table, and took pleasure in receiving guests at his 
board, though never more than one at a time. To this one guest 
he would talk fluently, yet not caring to listen in his turn." 
James Mill was often the one guest so highly favored. " Ben- 
tham lived in Queen's Square Place, Westminster, close to the 
residence of Mill and his family, and his house was lent to the 
historian of India." Acquainted with mental science (at that 
time not studied in London), through his training in Scottish 
philosophy, and his reading of Hartley, he became the leader in 
metaphysical thought in the metropolis. He had qualities 
which fitted him to influence young men. He was earnest ; he 
was clear ; he was strongly impressed with the evils of the past 
and present ; he spoke authoritatively and dogmatically, and with 
contempt of those who opposed him, and facile minds bent be- 
fore him. We have a friendly picture of him drawn by Mrs. 
Grote as he began to exercise a powerful influence over her 
husband. " Before many months the ascendancy of James Mill's 
powerful mind over his younger companion made itself ap- 
parent. George Grote began by admiring the wisdom, the 
acuteness, the depths of Mill's intellectual character. Presently 
he found himself inthralled in the circle of Mill's speculations ; 
and, after a year or two of intimate commerce, there existed but 
little difference, in point of opinion, between master and pupil. 
Mr. Mill had the strongest convictions as to the superior advan- 
tages of democratic government over the monarchical or the 
aristocratic ; and with these he mingled a scorn and hatred of 
the ruling classes which amounted to positive fanaticism. Coup- 
led with this aversion to aristocratic influence (to which influ- 
ence he invariably ascribed most of the defects and abuses 
prevalent in the administration of public affairs), Mr. Mill enter- 
tained a profound prejudice against the Established Church, 



374 JAMES MILL. [Art. lt. 

and, of course, a corresponding dislike to its ministers. These 
two vehement currents of antipathy came to be gradually shared 
by George Grote, in proportion as his veneration of Mr. Mill 
took deeper and deeper root. Although his own nature was of 
a gentle, charitable, humane quality, his fine intellect was worked 
upon by the inexorable teacher with so much persuasive power 
that George Grote found himself inoculated, as it were, with the 
conclusions of the former almost without a choice, since the 
subtle reasonings of Mr. Mill appeared to his logical mind to ad- 
mit of no refutation. And thus it came to pass that, starting 
from acquired convictions, George Grote adopted the next 
phase ; viz,, the antipathies of his teacher, — antipathies which 
colored his mind through the whole period of his ripe meridian 
age, and may be said to have inspired and directed many of the 
important actions of life. Originating in an earnest feeling for 
the public good, these currents gradually assumed the force and 
sanction of duties, prompting George Grote to a systematic 
course both of study, opinion, action, and self-denial, in which 
he was urgently encouraged by the master-spirit of James Mill, 
to that gentleman's latest breath in 1836, This able dogmatist 
exercised considerable influence over other young men of that 
day as well as over Grote. He was indeed a propagandist of a high 
order, equally master of the pen and of speech. Moreover, he 
possessed the faculty of kindling in his auditors the generous 
impulses towards the popular side both in politics and social 
theories ; leading them at the same time to regard the cultiva- 
tion of individual affections and sympathies as destructive of 
lofty aims and indubitably hurtful to the mental character." 
Mr. Grote says in 18 19 : " I have met Mill often at his (Ricord's) 
house, and hope to derive great pleasure and instruction from 
his acquaintance, as he is a very profound-thinking man and 
seems well disposed to communicate, as well as clear and intel- 
ligible in his manner. His mind has indeed all that cynicism 
and asperity which belong to the Benthamian school ; and what 
I chiefly dislike in him is the readiness and seeming preference 
with which he dwells on the faults and defects of others, even of 
the greatest of men. But it is so very rarely that a man of any 
depth comes across my path, that I shall almost assuredly culti- 
vate his acquaintance a good deal farther." We have a less favor- 
able picture in an article in the " Edinburgh Review" (July, 1873), 



Art. li.] A LEADER OF OPINION. 375 

which says of the son : " His fine and loving temper was con 
stantly struggling against the imperious dictates of his master, 
who had taught him to regard, as Mr. Grote tells us, the cultivation 
of individual affections and sympathies as destructive of lofty 
aims, and hurtful to the mental character. In the course of 
years several young men devoted to the study of metaphysics 
and mental philosophy were accustomed to meet twice a week 
at Mr. Grote's in the city, at half-past eight in the morning, 
for an hour or two. Jeremy Bentham was regarded by them as 
a kind of deity, whose utterances were closely watched and 
reverently received. James Mill was their prophet, who exer- 
cised uncontrolled sway over their minds." Mrs. Grote 
gives an account of the men and their studies. " They 
read Mr. Mill's last work, "The Analysis of the Phe- 
nomena of the Human Mind," Hartley " On Man," Dutrieux's 
"Logic," Whately's works, &c, discussing as they proceeded. 
Mr. John Stuart Mill, Mr. Charles Buller, Mr. Eyton Tooke, (son 
of Mr. Thomas Tooke), Mr. John Arthur Roebuck, Mr. G. H. 
Graham, Mr. Grant, and Mr. W. G. Prescott formed part of 
their class." 

He now became a leader of opinion, and imparted his own 
character to a whole school. His intellect was clear, but not 
comprehensive ; was strong, but one-sided. He saw what he 
wished to see, and did not go round the object to view the 
other side. Hence he was not troubled with uncertainties or 
doubts, and he laid down his opinions coolly and dogmatically, 
wondering how every man did not see as he did, and bearing 
no contradiction. The school of which he was a leader — or, 
rather, I believe, the leader — came to be called "Philosophical 
Radicalism," or sometimes the "Westminster Review" school, 
from that review being its organ. It was founded on Utilita- 
rianism in morals and on sensational empiricism in philosophy ; 
and Mill gave it its earnestness, its narrowness, its exclusive- 
ness, and its fanaticism. The school had at first the general 
sentiment against them ; but they persevered, and came in a 
few years to exercise a potent influence, which is felt at this 
day, in consequence mainly of the able men, then young, but 
now old or deceased, who became attached to it. 

He has left us no account of the religious crisis through 
which he passed, but his son has told us the results which he 



376 JAMES MILL. [Art. li. 

reached: "The turning point of his mind on the subject was 
reading Butler's ' Analogy.' That work, of which he always 
continued to speak with respect, kept him, as he said, for some 
considerable time a believer in the divine authority of Chris- 
tianity, by proving to him that, whatever are the difficulties in 
believing that the Old and New Testaments proceed from, or 
record the acts of, a perfectly wise and good Being, the same 
and still greater difficulties stand in the way of the belief that 
a Being of such a character can have been the Maker of the 
universe. He considered Butler's argument as conclusive 
against the only opponents for whom it was intended. Those 
who admit an omnipotent as well as perfectly just and benevo- 
lent Maker and Ruler of such a world as this can say little 
against Christianity but what can, with at least equal force, be 
retorted against themselves. Finding, therefore, no halting 
place in deism, he remained in a state of perplexity, until, 
doubtless after many struggles, he yielded to the conviction 
that, concerning the origin of things, nothing whatever can be 
known. This is the only correct statement of his opinion ; for 
dogmatic atheism he looked upon as absurd, as most of those 
whom the world has considered atheists have always done." 
" He found it impossible to believe that a world so full of evil 
was the work of an Author combining infinite power with per- 
fect goodness and righteousness." He saw, what natural re- 
ligion shuts its eyes to, that there were manifold evils in the 
world ; so say the Scriptures, and tell us how they sprang up, 
and point to the remedy, — a remedy which Mr. Mill was not pre- 
pared to adopt, and so was left without any relief from the dark 
prospect. We do not wonder in these circumstances that " he 
thought human life a poor thing at best, after the freshness of 
youth and of unsatisfied curiosity had gone by." 

He was thoroughly discontented with the education com- 
monly given to the young. " In psychology his fundamental 
doctrine was the formation of all human character by circum- 
stances, through the universal principle of association, and the 
consequent unlimited possibility of improving the moral and in- 
tellectual condition of mankind by education." So he took the 
education of his oldest son into his own hand. At three he 
taught him Greek ; and by the age of eight the boy had read 
" the whole of Herodotus, of Xenophon's 4 Cyropaedia ' and 



Art. li.] THE EDUCATION OF HIS SON. Z77 

'Memorials of Socrates,' some of the 4 Lives of the Philos- 
ophers ' by Diogenes Laertius, part of ' Isocrates ad Demoni- 
cum ' and ' Ad Nicoclem.' " At the age of nine he had read 
the first six Dialogues of Plato, from the " Euthyphron " to the 
" Theaetetus " inclusive. He was made to begin Latin in his 
eighth year ; and from his eighth to his twelfth year he read 
the " Bucolics " of Virgil and the first six books of the " ^Eneid," 
all Horace except the " Epodes," the " Fables " of Phaedrus, 
the first five books of Livy, with the remainder of the first 
decade, all Sallust, a considerable part of Ovid's " Metamor- 
phoses," some plays of Terence, two or three books of Lu- 
cretius, several of the orations of Cicero and of his writings 
on oratory and his " Letters to Atticus ;" and this while he was 
adding largely to his Greek and devouring elaborate volumes of 
history. At the age of twelve he entered on the study of logic, 
beginning with the " Analytics " of Aristotle. Everybody 
feels that it was a dangerous thing to lay such a load on the 
mind of one so young ; and that there was an imminent risk either 
of his brain being overworked or of his being turned into a 
pedant. The success of the trial proves that a boy of good 
ability may learn much more by systematic teaching than most 
people imagine. In the morning walks with the father the boy 
was induced to give an account of what he had read the day 
before. 

There were surely great oversights in this training, as, for in- 
stance, in not allowing him to mingle with other boys, and in 
restraining natural emotions. " For passionate emotions of all 
sorts, and for every thing that has been said or written in 
exaltation of them, he expressed the greatest contempt. He 
regarded them as a form of madness. The intense was with 
him a byword of scornful disapprobation." In respect of relig- 
ion the son says : " I am thus one of the very few examples of 
one who has not thrown off religious belief, but never had it : I 
grew up in a negative state with regard to it." The father 
" looked forward to a considerable increase of freedom in the re- 
lations between the sexes, though without pretending to define ex- 
actly what would be or ought to be the precise conditions of that 
freedom." A writer in the " Quarterly " (July, 1873) says : " He 
was full of what we should call the fanaticism of Malthusian- 
ism ; to such a degree that he risked his own fairly earned repu- 



37$ JAMES MILL. [Art. u. 

tation with decent people, and involved in the like discreditable 
danger the youth of his son, by running a Malay muck against 
what he called the superstitions of the nursery with regard to 
sexual relations, and giving the impulse to a sort of shameless 
propaganda of prescriptions for artificially checking population. 
We should not even have alluded to this grave offence against 
decency, on the part of the elder and younger Mill, had it 
not been forced on our notice by recent events." The result 
was what might have been expected. We can understand 
how the son's natural feelings, so repressed, should have been 
ready to flow forth towards a lady who entered thoroughly into 
his peculiar views on all subjects, and that he did not seek to 
restrain these feelings, and had no compunctions of conscience, 
though that lady was married to another man. I believe we can 
see the result of the training in a younger son, represented as an 
engaging youth, who went to a warm climate for his health, 
and when there insisted on the physician telling him whether 
there was any hope of his recovery, and, on receiving an unfa- 
vorable reply, went and shot himself to avoid a lingering death. 1 
The work with which we have to do, is his "Analysis of the 
Human Mind." The title indicates the aim of the treatise. It 
is not an inductive observation of facts ; it is not a classification 
of facts in a cautious and careful manner : it is a determined 
attempt to resolve the complex phenomena of the mind into as 
few elements as possible. Mental analysis, called by Whewell 
the decomposition of facts, is undoubtedly a necessary agent in 
all investigation : but it should be kept as a subordinate instru- 
ment ; and it requires to be preceded, accompanied, and verified 
throughout, by a microscopic and conscientious inspection of 
facts, with particular attention to residuary phenomena and ap- 
parent exceptions ; if this is neglected the whole process may 
lead' to most fallacious results. Thomas Brown had proceeded 
very much in the method of analysis, and accomplished a great 
many feats in the way of decompounding the faculties enume- 
rated by Reid and Stewart ; and, encouraged by his success, Mill 
advances a great way further on the same route. Brown had 
stood up resolutely for the existence and validity of intuition, 

1 I had this from the late John Pirn, of Belfast, who was at the place at the 
time. I would not have referred to it had the suicide been the result of a mental 
derangement : it was the logical consequence of the philosophic training. 



Art. li.] SENSATION AND IDEATION. 379 

maintaining in particular that we have an intuitive belief in cause 
and effect ; had allotted a place, though an inadequate one, to 
judgment, under the name of " relative suggestion ; " had poured 
forth a most eloquent exposition of the emotions, and defended 
the great truths of natural religion, including the existence of 
the deity and the immortality of the soul. Mill resolves all 
mental exercises into sensations and ideas, with laws of asso- 
ciation connecting and combining them ; and has left himself 
avowedly no religious belief whatever. 

Dugald Stewart's teaching seems to have exercised little in- 
fluence on his mind except to suggest the order in which he 
takes up his topics. I suspect he derived more from Hume 
than from Stewart. With Hume there is nothing in the mind 
but impressions and ideas ; with Mill, only sensations and 
ideas ; and both undermine our belief in the reality either of 
mind or body. He took advantage of all that has been done, 
in illustrating the influence of association, by Hutcheson, 
Smith, Hume, Beattie, Alison, and Brown, and accounted by 
it for principles which these men reckoned original. He had 
also profoundly studied Hartley (" Observations on Man "), who 
had accounted for our complex mental feelings by sensations, 
ideas of sensations and association, connecting the whole with 
a theory of nerve vibrations, which Mill, following the Scottish 
school, abandoned. 

Following the sensational school of France and Brown, he 
calls all the exercises of the mind " feelings." He begins with 
sensations, and goes over (Chap. I.) smell, hearing, sight, taste, 
touch, carefully separating from touch as Brown had done, and 
as Mr. Bain has since done, the feeling of resistance, exten- 
sion, and figure, which he refers to muscular sensation ; he 
also dwells fondly, as Mr. Bain has done, on the sensations of 
disorganization in the alimentary canal. He then treats of 
idea (Chap. II.) ; and now " we have two classes of feelings, one 
which exists when the object of sense is present, another that 
exists after the object of sense has ceased to be present. The 
one class of feelings I call sensations ; the other class of feel- 
ings I call ideas." At this stage we wonder where or how he 
has got objects of sense with nothing but sensations and ideas. 
" As we say sensation, we might also say ideation : " " sensation 
would in that case be a general name for one part of our con- 



3 So JAMES MILL. [Art. li. 

stitution, ideation for another." It is clear that Mill's analysis 
has been the main book, or the only book on mental science, care- 
fully studied by a certain class of London physiologists, — such 
as Carpenter, Huxley, and Maudesley, — who seldom rise above 
the contemplation of sensations and sensations reproduced. 
Verily it is an easy way of enunciating and unfolding all the 
varied processes of the mind to represent them as feelings, and 
put them under two heads, sensations and ideas ; the ideas being 
copies of sensations, so that he is able to say : " There is nothing 
in the mind but sensations and copies of sensations." There is no 
room left for knowledge of objects or belief in objects, internal 
and external, no judgment or reasoning, no perception of moral 
good and evil. It is a more inadequate resolution than that of 
Condillac, who called in a sort of alchemical power, and spoke 
of "transformed sensations." Mr. Grote writes to the younger 
Mill : " It has always rankled in my thoughts that so 
grand and powerful a mind as he should have left behind it 
such insufficient traces in the estimation of successors." I do 
not wonder that such a meagre exposition should not have car- 
ried with it the highest minds of the age, which turned more 
eagerly towards the German speculators, and towards Cole- 
ridge, Cousin, and Hamilton. But his book has had its influ- 
ence over the school to which he belonged, including Mr. Grote, 
and over certain physiologists, who, if they have only sensa- 
tions and copies of sensations to account for, are tempted to 
imagine that they can explain them all by organic processes. 
His son, John Stuart, and Mr. Bain, have been greatly swayed 
by the elder Mill, but have clearly perceived the enormous 
defects of the analysis, which they have sought to rectify in the 
valuable edition of the work published in 1869 ; the fundamen- 
tal defects however remain, and the corrections admit principles 
which these authors have not dared to avow or to carry out, 
as they involve so many other mental operations beyond sensa- 
tions and ideas. 

In Chap. III. he goes on to his favorite subject, association 
of ideas. Ideas have a synchronous and a successive order. 
When sensations have occurred synchronically, the ideas also 
spring up synchronically," and thus he fashions many of our 
complex ideas, as of a violin with a certain figure and tone. 
He resolves the ideas of successive associations into the one 



Art. li.] THE FACULTIES OF THE MIND. 381 

law of contiguity. This resolution has been criticised by- 
Hamilton ("Reid's Collected Works" Note D. ... § 2), and 
also by his son (Note to Chap. III.), who endeavor to show that 
the suggestion of similars cannot be thus accounted for, which 
they certainly cannot be unless we call in some intermediate 
processes. He shows how, by these associations, we get cer- 
tain complex ideas, as the ideas of metals from the separate 
ideas of several sensations, — color, hardness, extension, weight. 
In illustrating this point, he says, that " philosophy has ascer- 
tained that we draw nothing from the eye whatever but sensa- 
tions of color." In opposition to this, Hamilton has demon- 
strated that, if we perceive color, we must also perceive the line 
that separates one color from another (Met. Lect. 27). The 
result he has reached is summed up : " We have seen first that 
we have sensations ; secondly, that we have ideas, the copies 
of these sensations ; thirdly, that those ideas are sometimes 
simple, the copies of one sensation ; sometimes complex, the 
copies of several sensations so combined as to appear not sev- 
eral ideas but one idea ; and, fourthly, that we have trains of 
these ideas, or one succeeding another without end." 

He turns to naming (Chap. IV.), and treats of the various 
parts of speech, but throws little light on them. He goes on 
to explain the various processes of the mind, beginning with 
consciousness (Chap. V.). " To say I feel a sensation, is merely 
to say I feel a feeling, which is an impropriety of speech ; 
and to say I am conscious of a feeling is merely to say that I 
feel it. To have a feeling is to be conscious, and to be con 
scious is to have a feeling." " In the very word ' feeling ' all that 
is implied in the word ' consciousness ' is involved." There is a 
palpable oversight here. When I feel a sensation it is of a sen- 
sitive organ as affected, and knowledge is involved in this. 
To be conscious is to know self as feeling or in some other 
state. " When I smell a rose, I am conscious." True, but I 
am conscious not of the rose, but of self as having the sensa- 
tion. In explaining consciousness, he overlooks the very 
peculiarity of the thing to be explained. 

He then (Chap. V., VI., VII., VIII., IX.) treats of conception, 
imagination, classification, abstraction. " Conception applies 
only to ideas and to ideas only in a state of combination. It 
is a general name, including the several classes of complex 



382 JAMES MILL. [Art. li. 

ideas." But the question arises, What intellectual bond com- 
bines things generally? and we have no satisfactory answer. 
He thus misses one of the most important capacities of our 
mental nature. " An imagination is the name of a train ; " but 
what combines so many scattered things into one image, often 
so grand ? He has a long disquisition on classification. " The 
word ' man/ we shall say, is first applied to an individual ; it is 
jfirst associated with the idea of that individual, and acquires 
'the power of calling up the idea of him ; it is next applied to 
another individual, and acquires the power of calling up the 
idea of him, so of another and another, till it has become asso- 
ciated with an infinite number, and has acquired the power of 
calling up an indefinite number of these ideas indifferently." 
" It is association that forms the ideas of an indefinite number 
of individuals into one complex idea." Here again he has 
explained every thing by overlooking the differentia of the pro- 
cess, — the resemblance between the individuals ; the perception 
of the resemblances ; the placing the resembling objects into a 
class of which so many predications may be made ; and, as 
might be expected, he has no idea that there is such a thing as 
classes in nature. By taking a superficial view, he is able to 
throw ridicule on the theory of ideas by Plato, by Philo, by Cud- 
worth, and Harris, in which there is no doubt much mysticism, 
but also much truth, which it should be the business of a correct 
analysis to bring out to view. The father thus set his son to 
what he is so fond of in his " Logic " and other works, — the 
exposure of the error of looking on concepts as if they were 
individual existences. True, universals are not the same as 
singulars, yet they may have a reality which we should try to 
seize : some of them ante rem, in the Divine mind arranging 
classes in nature ; in re y in the common attributes which join 
the objects in the class ; and post rem, in the concepts formed 
by the mind, and performing most important functions in 
thought. Both Mr. Grote and Mr. John Stuart Mill in their notes 
have tried to improve Mill's doctrine of generification, but have 
left it, and their own doctrine as well, in a most unsatisfactory 
state. Abstract terms " are simply the concrete terms with 
the connotation dropped," whereon his son annotates. "This 
seems a very indirect and circuitous mode of making us under- 
stand what an abstract name signifies. Instead of aiming 



Art. li.] MEMORY AND BELIEF. 383 

directly at the mark, it goes round it. It tells us that one 
name signifies a part of what another name signifies, leaving 
us to infer that part." Neither father nor son has seen that 
abstraction in all cases implies a high exercise of judgment or 
comparison, in which we perceive the relation of a part to a 
whole, a process which is the basis of so many other intellec- 
tual exercises. 

He turns (Chap. X.) to memory, which has so puzzled the 
son, who says : " Our belief in the veracity of memory is evi- 
dently ultimate : no reason can be given for it which does not 
presuppose the belief and assume it to be well grounded." 
The subject presents no difficulties to the father. He acknowl- 
edges that in memory there is not only the idea of the thing 
remembered ; there is also the idea of my having seen it : and 
he shows that this implies " the idea of my present self, the 
remembering self ; and the idea of my past self, the remem- 
bered or witnessing self ? " But where has he got self ? Where 
a past self? He brings in, without attempting to explain 
them, self, and time present, and past, which are not sen- 
sations nor copies of sensations. All that is done is " to 
run over a number of states of consciousness called up by the 
association." There is here, as in so many other cases, simply 
the shutting of the eye to the main element in memory, the 
recognition of an object as having been before the mind in 
time past : in which there is involved, first, belief, and, sec- 
ondly, time in the concrete, from which the mind forms the 
idea of time in the abstract. 

There follows (Chap. XI.) an elaborate discussion of belief, 
which both his son and Mr. Bain have been seeking to amend 
without success ; because their own views, starting from those 
of the older Mill, are radically defective. In all belief, as it 
appears to me, there is a conviction of the reality of the object 
believed in. When the object is present, I would be disposed 
to call this knowledge ; but, if any one calls it belief, the question 
between him and me would be simply a verbal one, provided 
he acknowledges the existence of a conviction. In other cases 
the conviction or belief is the result of judgment or reasoning. 
Let us now look at the account given by Mill. " A sensation 
is a feeling, but a sensation and a belief of it is the same thing. 
The observation applies equally to ideas. When I say I have 



3^4 JAMES MILL. IArt. li. 

the idea of the sun, I express the same thing exactly as when I 
say that I believe I have it. The feeling is one : the names 
only are different." Here again the resolution is accomplished 
so dexterously, because the main elements of the thing re- 
solved are not noticed. In a sensation I have not only a feel- 
ing, but a belief in the existence of a sentient organ. To have 
a belief in the existence of the sun is something more than 
merely to have an idea of the sun. The belief, be it intuitive, 
or be it derivative, is a different thing from the sensation and 
the idea, and should have a separate place in every system of 
psychology. 

It is at this place that he develops most fully the principle 
for which he has received such praise from his son, — the prin- 
ciple of inseparable association. " In every instance of belief, 
there is indissoluble association of the ideas," and he defies 
any one to show that there is any other ingredient. But, surely, 
there is often belief without any inseparable association : thus 
I may believe that a friend is dead, though in time past all my 
associations have been of him as alive. But, even in cases of 
indissoluble association, the belief is different from the associa- 
tion. One of the grand defects of the whole theory consists in 
accounting by association of ideas for what is assuredly a 
different process, for judgment, for judgment proceeding on a 
knowledge of things. At no other point do we see so clearly 
the tendency of the whole school to degrade the dignity and 
undermine the trustworthiness of the human intellect. 

By this indissoluble association he can account easily for our 
belief in causation. " I hear words in the street, — event ; some 
one of course is making them, — antecedent. My house is 
broken and my goods are gone, — event ; a thief has taken them, 
— antecedent. This is that remarkable case of association in 
which the association is inseparable." "We cannot think 
[in the sense of having an idea] of the one without thinking of 
the other." Once more the essential element is left out ; we 
not only have an idea, we judge, decide, and believe ; and when 
we judge, decide, and believe, that everywhere, at all times, 
and for ever, an event has and must have a cause, the process 
seems to me to be justifiable, but to involve an intuitive prin- 
ciple. Mr. John Stuart Mill is only following out the principles 
advocated by his father, when he holds that there may be worlds 



Art. li.] RATIOCINATION AND EXPLANATIONS. 385 

in which two and two make five, and in which there may be an 
effect without a cause. In another subject James Mill has 
led his son to a point where the father has stopped, while the 
son has gone on. " In my belief, then, of the existence of an 
object, there is included the belief that, in such and such cir- 
cumstances, I should have such and such sensations. Is there 
any thing more ? " " I not only believe that I shall see St. 
Paul's church-yard, but I believe that I should see it if I were 
in St. Paul's church-yard this instant." This is on the very verge 
of the son's definition of body and of mind. We see how needful 
it is to examine the fundamental assumptions of a philosophy 
which has culminated in such results, and is undermining our 
belief in the reality of things. 

In Chap. XII. we have a short and feeble account of ratio- 
cination, in which he proceeds on the syllogistic analysis with- 
out comprehending the principles involved in it. He takes as 
his example, " All men are animals. Kings are men. There- 
fore kings are animals ; " and he, shows that in all this there is 
only association, and the belief which is part of it. In the propo- 
sition "kings are men," the belief is merely the recognition that 
the individuals named kings are part of the many of whom men 
is the common name. " Kings " is associated with " all men," 
" all men " with " animals ; " " kings," therefore, with animals. 
The account of evidence, in the short chapter which succeeds, 
is merely a summation of what had gone before, and is exceed- 
ingly meagre. 

'He now turns (Chap. XIV.) to " names requiring particular 
explanations," and explains, according to his theory of sensa- 
tions and ideas, such profound subjects as relations, numbers, 
time, motion, identity. Mr. Bain represents him as here " en- 
deavoring to express the most fundamental fact of consciousness, 
the necessity of change or transition from one state to another, 
in order to our being conscious. He approaches very near to, 
without exactly touching, the inference, that all consciousness, 
all sensation, all knowledge, must be of doubles!' as if we could 
not have a sensation of pain till there is a change into pleasure, 
or of pleasure till we have also pain. This is to reverse the 
natural process in which we have first the individuals, and thus 
and then discover relations between them, — it may be, many 
and varied, according to the knowledge we previously have of 

25 



386 JAMES MILL. [Art. li. 

the individuals. According to Mill, that a feeling of red and 
a feeling of blue is " different and known to be so, are not two 
things but one and the same thing ; " thus doing away with all 
relation, in fact with all comparison and judgment, and reason- 
ing as founded on comparison. " Space is a mere abstract 
term formed by dropping the connotation. Linear extension is 
the idea of a line, the connotation dropped ; that is, the idea of 
resisting dropped." We ask what is the line ? Infinite is the 
concrete term, here denoting line : drop the connotation, and 
you have infinity, the abstract." It is a convenient but certainly 
a most fallacious way of reducing realities to nonentities. Time 
is "pastness, presentness, and futureness" joined by association ; 
but he can render no account of pastness, presentness, and fu- 
tureness. The idea of motion and the idea of extension are 
the same. Identity is merely the name of a certain case of 
belief. " Reflection (Chap. XV.) is nothing ; but consciousness 
is the having the sensations and ideas : " most people would say 
it is a knowledge of self, as having an idea, a sensation, or some 
other mental exercise. 

He treats from Chap. XVI.-XXII. of the active powers of 
the mind, or the powers which excite to action. All through- 
out, he gains a delusive simplicity, simply by overlooking an 
element, commonly the main element, in the phenomenon. 
Desire is the same thing as the idea of a pleasure, " and the 
number of our desires is the same with that of our pleasurable 
sensations ; the number of our aversions, the same with that of 
our painful sensations." I hold that desire is something super- 
added to mere sensation, and indicating a higher capacity, and 
that we may and ought to desire many things beside mere sensa- 
tions of pleasure. He then proceeds to show us in the way 
the Scottish metaphysicians had done, from Hutcheson and 
Turnbull downwards ; how the desire of pleasure gives rise to 
other impulses, which may by association become ends, and 
not mere means ; such as, wealth, power, dignity, friendship, 
kindness, family, country, party, mankind. " A man looks 
upon his child as a cause to him of future pains and pleas- 
ures, much more certain than any other person ; " and thus 
gathers round it a whole host of associations that constitute 
parental love. All this I admit will mingle with and strengthen 
family affection ; but in the heart of the affection there is a natu- 



Art. li.] MOTIVES AND MORAL SENSE. 387 

ral love on the part of parents for their children. In account- 
ing for the love of beauty, he takes advantage of Alison's theory, 
a theory not favored by those who have discovered mathematical 
relations in beautiful forms. The following quotation will en- 
able us to understand what he means by motives : " As every 
pleasure is worth having, — for otherwise it would not be a pleas- 
ure, — the idea of every pleasure associated with that of an 
action of ours as the cause is a motive ; that is, leads to the 
action. But every motive does not produce the action. The 
reason is, the existence of other motives which prevent it. A 
man is tempted to commit adultery with the wife of his friend : 
the composition of the motive is obvious. He does not obey 
the motive. Why ? He obeys other motives which are stronger. 
Though pleasures are associated with the immoral act, pains 
are associated with it also ; the pains of the injured husband, 
the pains of the injured wife, the moral indignation of man- 
kind, the future reproaches of his own mind. Some men obey 
the first rather than the second motive. The reason is obvious. 
In them the association of the act with the pleasure is, from 
habit, unduly strong : the association of the act with the pains 
is, from want of habit, unduly weak. This is a case of education." 
I believe that if men were trained to think that chastity has no 
other foundation than Mr. Mill has given it, the husband would 
be little attended to when he claimed to be injured, and the wife 
would cease to believe that she had injured any one, and the 
moral indignation of mankind would disappear ; thus perilous 
would it be to remove morality from its foundation in moral 
principle, and place it on the shifting sand of association. 

We are prepared for his analysis of the moral sense. " It is 
interesting here to observe by what a potent call we are sum- 
moned to virtue. Of all that we enjoy more is derived from 
those acts of other men on which we bestow the name ' vir- 
tue,' than from any other cause. Our own virtue is the principal 
cause why other men reciprocate the acts of virtue towards us : 
with the idea of our own acts of virtue there are naturally asso- 
ciated the ideas of all the immense advantages we derive from 
the virtuous acts of our fellow-creatures. When this association 
is formed in due strength, which it is the main business of a 
good education to effect, the motive of virtue becomes para- 
mount in the human breast." By all means let us try to collect 



388 JOHN BALLANTYNE. [Art. lii. 

good associations round virtuous acts ; but, as the centre and 
bond of the whole, let us have the principle that virtuous acts 
should be done because they are right. Discard this restraint, 
and attractive associations will be sure to gather round vice. 
He tells us (" Fragment on Mackintosh "), that his analysis of 
virtue into the love of pleasure and association does not lessen 
the influence of the motive. " Gratitude remains gratitude, 
resentment remains resentment, generosity, generosity in the 
mind of him who feels them, after analysis, the same as before." 
Yes in the mind of him " who feels them ; " but the feeling 
may be undermined, and remorse for sin be quieted. 

He closes the work with a discussion as to will and inten- 
tion. Will is the peculiar state of mind or consciousness by 
which action is preceded. He treats of its influence over the 
actions of the body, and over the actions of the mind. He 
shows that sensations and ideas are the true antecedents of the 
bodily actions, and so he does not need to call in a separate 
capacity called the will. He then turns to the power which the 
mind seems to possess over its associations. He proves, as 
Brown and others had done, that we cannot will an absent idea 
before us, — for to will it is already to have it ; and the recalling 
is always a process of association. He does not see that, by a 
stern act of will, we can detain a present thought, and thus 
gather around it a whole host of associations. He speaks of 
ends, but has no idea of the way in which ends spring up and 
influence the mind. He takes no notice of the essential free- 
dom belonging to the will, and thus leaves no ground on which 
to rear the doctrine of human responsibility. 



LII. — JOHN BALLANTYNE} 

He was born at Piteddie, parish of Kinghorn, Fifeshire, May 8, 1778, and 
received his early education in the village school of Lochgelly. He matric- 
ulated in the university of Edinburgh in 1795, and seems there to have 
enjoyed the privilege of sitting under the instructions of Dugald Stewart. 
His parents belonged to the church of Scotland, but from conscientious 

1 " Recollections of Rev. John Ballantyne," an address delivered at a soirde 
on opening the new United Presbyterian Church, Stonehaven, by Rev. John 
Longmuir, Aberdeen, 1S62. 



Art. lii.] HIS EXAMINATION OF THE MIND. 389 

motives, and from perceiving the want of religion in the students intending 
for the ministry in that body, he joined the burgher branch of the seceders, 
and attended their theological hall, where his metaphysical abilities were 
noticed by his professor Dr. Lawson. After being licensed to preach the 
gospel, he taught schools at Lochgelly, and at Colinsburgh. In 1805, he 
was settled as minister in the shire of Kincardine, at Stonehaven, a some- 
what exposed place on the German ocean, but made interesting by bold 
rocks in the neighborhood, and a grand old ruined castle where the cove- 
nanters had been imprisoned. There he ministered to a small congregation 
of fifty members, and specially exerted himself in establishing sabbath 
schools, at that time very much unknown in the district. He lived a shy 
and retired life, cheerful in his own home, but not much known beyond, 
except by a few who noticed him taking his solitary walk daily along the 
links of Cowie, with tall and well-proportioned frame, and high capacious 
forehead, pondering, they supposed, some deep ecclesiastical or philosophic 
subject. In 1824, he published anonymously, "A Comparison of Estab- 
lished and Dissenting Churches by a Dissenter," and, in 1830, an enlarged 
edition of the same with his name prefixed. This work may be regarded 
as starting the voluntary controversy, which was carried on vigorously by 
the religious body to which he belonged, for years agitated Scotland from 
one end of it to the other, in the course of time spread into England, 
and, directly or indirectly, has been followed by far-reaching results, that 
have not yet exhausted themselves. There is reason to believe that he 
foresaw the consequences ; he told his friend, Mr. Longmuir, that he ex- 
pected to see him out of the established church and a dissenting minister 
like himself. 

But he was also speculating on other topics. In 1828, he published 
"An Examination of the Human Mind." It should be interesting to any 
one who has had to contend with adverse circumstances to contemplate 
this man in his quiet seceder manse on that bare coast, and among a people 
who appreciated his piety and devotedness, but had no comprehension of 
his philosophy, devoting himself so earnestly to the original study of the 
human mind. He could have been swayed by no inferior hope in the shape 
of an expected chair in one of the Scottish colleges ; for these, while open to 
persons adhering really or nominally to established-church Presbyterianism 
and Episcopacy were practically closed to a dissenting minister. This was 
doubtless one of the rankling causes that prompted the seceders to espouse 
the voluntary side so eagerly. They felt, in an age which was moving on 
towards the reform bill, that they had a title to complain of being consigned 
to an inferior position : it should be added that they felt that they had to 
abandon their strict covenanting principles, which were seen to be exclu- 
sive. Nor was this man or his book likely to get a favorable hearing from 
the literary or metaphysical readers in Scotland, where the influential 
thinkers were James Mylne and Thomas Brown, to whose philosophy he 
was entirely opposed ; and, as to England, it felt little interest in such in- 
quiries. The work, though clearly written, has no such literary beauties as 
drew many towards the writings of Stewart and Brown, and it had some 
difficulty in getting into notice. There is no evidence that any of the pro- 



39° JOHN BALLANTYNE. [Art. lii. 

fessors in the chairs of mental science took any interest in it, or were dis- 
posed to lift the author out of his obscurity. Nevertheless there were some 
in his own religious communion, and beyond it, who perceived the merit of 
the work, which is distinguished for its independence, and its rising above 
the philosophy of his time. "A gentleman," says Mr. Longmuir, "emi- 
nent both for his wealth and literary distinction, (the late Mr. Douglas of 
Cavers ?) having seen the manuscript, and been informed of the limited 
means of the author, kindly offered to run the risk of its publication ; but 
Mr. Ballantyne, having found that he had accumulated sufficient means to 
publish it himself, gratefully declined the generous offer. Some time after, 
a considerable sum of money was sent by the same gentleman, and placed 
entirely at Mr. Ballantyne's disposal. Instead of applying it, however, to 
the publication of his book, he paid it over for the benefit of the missionary 
operations that his presbytery was then promoting." A disparaging notice 
of his work appeared in " The Edinburgh Literary Journal," a periodical 
long since consigned to oblivion, but he was not moved by it : he had done 
his work, and left it to speak for itself. Thus lived, and thus died, Nov. 5, 
1830, one who was, above all things, resolute in maintaining his indepen- 
dence, both of action and thinking, — independence not of God, but of man. 

He finds it necessary to criticise Dr. Brown, and has anticipated some 
of the objections, afterwards propounded more formally by Hamilton. 
" The system of Dr. Brown certainly discovers great ingenuity, and is ex- 
pounded with great eloquence ; but it appears to betray a want of that per- 
severing diligence and scrupulous caution, without which metaphysical 
inquiries are in a great measure unavailing." He begins with a discussion 
of the sensitive principle." He distinguishes between sensations and 
ideas of sensation. "The sensations and ideas of extension, as far as can 
be ascertained, are suggested at the very same instant," where, it may be 
observed, that he uses the very objectionable word " suggest." " Almost 
"the whole of the body, whether external or internal, is sensitive ; and an 
impression on every sensitive part, whether occasioned by an external or 
internal influence, is accompanied with a sensation." " It is also accom- 
panied, I imagine, with an idea of extension corresponding to the form and 
magnitude of the impression." " We always find that an impression on 
the organ of taste is accompanied not only with a sensation, but with an 
idea of the part of the organ affected." " It is highly probable that the 
organ of smell also affords ideas of extension." " The sense of hearing 
seems to be governed by the same laws." Locke taught that we get our 
ideas of extension solely from sight and touch. Ballantyne maintains that 
we have them from all the senses, because by all the senses we have "an 
idea of the part of the organ affected," here anticipating favorite positions 
of Hamilton and the physiologist Muller. 

He criticises the doctrine of Brown, that by the eye we discern only 
color, not in so clinching a manner as Hamilton, but in a like spirit. 
" Some indeed contend that sight affords only sensations of color, and no 
idea of extension at all ; but this opinion has never been established by 
adequate evidence and appears to be incompatible with not a few phenom- 
ena. At any rate, in the present state of our knowledge, we certainly have 



Art. lii.] ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 391 

by sight ideas of extension and ideas of greater or smaller portions of it, 
other things being equal, according to the impression on the organ, and 
are bound, therefore, to regard this as an ultimate principle, till it be traced 
to one more general. This, so far as I know, has never yet been done, and 
I am utterly unable to perceive how it can be done." 

" We, never but find that an impression on a sensitive organ is accom- 
panied with an idea of duration, as well as with a sensation and an idea of 
extension." " Every impression, besides suggesting a sensation and an 
idea of extension, suggests in connection with them an idea of a portion of 
duration corresponding to the duration of the impression." And here he 
has again to criticise Brown, and by anticipation Mill. " There are no 
doubt many analogies between duration and extension ; but to assume that 
they are literally one and the same thing, as Dr. Brown most evidently 
does, is one of the most unwarrantable assumptions that ever was haz- 
arded." "That doctrine is, that duration and extension are substantially 
one and the same thing, and that a cubical foot, or a cubical yard, is not 
essentially different from an hour or a day." The sensations and ideas of 
extension "will give rise to the notion of length of duration as occurring 
in different points of duration, and of course as occurring in succession ; 
but, unless length of duration be the same thing with length of extension, 
they can evidently give us no manner of notion of this latter species of 
length at all." 

He has a very elaborate inquiry into the associative principle, " a branch 
of our constitution still involved in considerable obscurity." As I believe 
him to be right in affirming that at this point there are many unsettled ques- 
tions, and as his observations are original and independent, I will quote from 
him at considerable length. He shows that ideas suggest each other, not 
according to relation among their objects, but among the ideas themselves. 
He dwells on what he calls the law of precedence. " One idea acquires 
power to suggest another by immediately preceding it," using the word 
"power" in the sense in which it is commonly used in physical inquiries. 
It follows, (1.) " If one idea acquire power to suggest another by immediately 
preceding it, the greater the number of ideas that it immediately precedes, 
the greater the number it will acquire the power of suggesting." (2.) If one 
idea acquire power to suggest others by immediately preceding them, the 
more frequently it precedes, the greater power it must acquire to suggest 
them. He thus explains the circumstance that, when we meet with a person 
whom we have formerly seen only in one particular place, there is usually, 
to our recollection, a very distinct idea of that place ; but when we meet 
with a person whom we have seen in a great many different places, there is 
seldom recalled an idea of any of them. (3.) If an idea acquire power to 
suggest others by immediately preceding them, the greater the number of 
ideas that immediately precede any others, the greater will be their power 
when they recur to suggest these ideas. (4.) If an idea acquire power to 
suggest another by immediately preceding it, the more vivid the idea that 
precedes any other, the greater will be its power when it recurs in a state 
equally vivid to suggest it. 

He says that the law of contiguity in point of time is really three laws, — 



39 2 JOHN BALLANTYNE, [Art. lii. 

that "an idea will acquire power to suggest another by immediately pre- 
ceding it, by existing at the same with it, and by immediately following it. 
The first of these laws is that of precedence, and into it he resolves all the 
others. Thus he resolves the law of coexistence into precedence. " Let 
A and B be two ideas which coexist for two sensible points of time, then 
A, while existing in the first point, precedes B while B is existing in the 
second ; and B, while existing in the first point, precedes A while A is 
existing in the second point." Proceeding on the principle that the greater 
the number of ideas that coexist with any other, the greater the number 
afterwards suggested by it, he explains how the longer an idea continues in 
the mind, the more readily will it afterwards recur ; how the more frequently 
it has been in the mind, it will come up the more readily ; how the longer it 
continues, it will be the more likely to recur ; and how the more frequently 
it has been in the mind, it will be the more likely to continue. He resolves 
in the same way the law of contiguity in place, and the law of cause and 
effect ; and affirms that the idea of cause has no power, independently of the 
law of precedence, to suggest the idea of an effect. He tries hard to explain 
in the same way the law of similarity. " Yesterday I saw a winged animal, 
to-day a winged animal of the same species." "When I yesterday saw 
the first animal, I obtained ideas of its peculiar qualities, and likewise of 
those common to it with all the individuals of the species to which it be- 
longed. To-day, when I saw the other animal, I also obtained ideas of its 
peculiar properties, and of those common to it with all the species to which 
it belonged, that is, along with the ideas of the peculiar properties of the 
second animal, I obtained a number of ideas which coexisted with those of 
the peculiar properties of the first. According to the doctrine of coexist- 
ence, formerly explained, they would suggest ideas of the peculiar properties 
of the first. When they do so, I have ideas both of the common and of the 
peculiar properties of the first animal ; in other words, I have an idea of 
the first animal itself, for that idea can be nothing but the aggregate of the 
ideas of its common and peculiar properties." He explains the law of con- 
trast by showing that, in every case where contrasted ideas suggest one 
another, it will be found that there is a considerable degree of similarity 
along with the contrast. He accounts by the same law of precedence for the 
secondary laws of Brown. Some of these resolutions seem to me over 
subtle, but they are worthy of consideration by those who would sound the 
depths of the subject. 

He treats at length of the voluntary principle, and offers many judicious 
remarks. He criticises Stewart's doctrine of power, according to which 
" the author of nature has bestowed on matter no powers at all, of course 
never preserves its powers in being, nor even employs them in accomplish- 
ing his purposes, as there are no powers to be exercised. In the second 
volume (Part II.), he treats of moral law, of right, jurisprudence, and politics, 
somewhat after the manner of Stewart, with considerable sweep of style, 
but no great power of metaphysical analysis. 



Art. Lin.] THOMAS CHALMERS. 393 



LIII. — THOMAS CHALMERS. 1 

Hitherto there has been a severance, at times an opposition, 
if not avowed yet felt, between the Scottish philosophy and 
the Scottish theology. The one had magnified human nature, 
and tended to produce a legal, self-righteous spirit ; whereas the 
other humbled man and exalted God, enjoining such graces as 
faith, humility, and penitence. But there never was any real 
opposition between the facts gathered by the one and the truths 
taken out of God's Word by the other. The metaphysicians 
had shown that there is such a faculty in man as the con- 
science ; and the conscience proclaims that man is a sinner, 
while the Bible provides a forgiveness for the sinner in a way 
which honors the moral law. The reconciliation between the 
philosophy and the religion was effected by Thomas Chalmers, 
who has had greater influence in moulding the religious be- 
lief and character of his countrymen than any one since the 
greatest Scotchman, John Knox. 

He was born at Anstruther, in the " East Neuk " of Fife, 
and was the son of a reputable merchant there. In his boyish 
days he had to suffer not a little from a nurse and from a 
teacher who ruled by the rod ; but he was "joyous, vigorous, 
and humorous." He manifested his natural character from an 
early age, being eager and impetuous in pursuing his favorite 
ends. He was not a very diligent pupil, but was a leader in fun 
and frolic. At the age of twelve he entered the University of 
St. Andrews, which about that time had such pupils as John 
(afterwards Sir John) Leslie, James Mylne, and John (after- 
wards Chief Justice) Campbell. He is described as " enthu- 
siastic and persevering in every thing he undertook, giving his 
whole mind to it, and often pursuing some favorite and even, as 
we thought, some foolish idea, whilst we were talking around him 
and perhaps laughing at his abstraction, or breaking in upon 
his cogitations and pronouncing him the next thing to mad ; 2 
and then he would good-naturedly join in the merriment with 

1 " Memoir of Thomas Chalmers," by William Hanna. 

2 In fact, " Daft Tam Chalmers " was a phrase applied to him by those who 
could not discern his greatness in the bud. 



394 THOMAS CHALMERS. [Art. liii. 

his common affectionate expression 'very well, my good lads.' " 
It was in 1793 that he was awakened intellectually, and became 
excited with and absorbed in geometry, for which he had a 
strong taste and talent. 

" St. Andrews," he tells us in after years, "was at this time 
overrun with moderatism, under the chilling influence of which 
we inhaled not a distaste only, but a positive contempt, for all 
that is properly and peculiarly gospel ; insomuch that our con- 
fidence was nearly as entire in the sufficiency of natural theol- 
ogy as in the sufficiency of natural science." He has left it 
on record that he profited by the debating societies of the col- 
lege. At this time he studied Godwin's " Political Justice," 
and was staggered by Mirabaud's " System of Nature." His 
friend, Professor Duncan, tells us that " he studied Edwards 
on Free Will with such ardor that he seemed to regard nothing 
else, could scarcely talk of any thing else, and one was almost 
afraid of his mind losing its balance." His favorite study, 
however, continued to be mathematics, towards which, as the 
science of quantity, he had a strong predilection, as shown in 
his propensity to count his steps as he walked. Still, even at 
this time, he had aspirations after something higher. One 
common expression in his college prayers was : " Oh ! give us 
some steady object for our mind to rest on." " I remember 
when a student of divinity, and long ere I could relish evangel- 
ical sentiment, I spent nearly a twelvemonth in a sort of men- 
tal Elysium, and the one idea which ministered to my soul all 
its rapture, was the magnificence of the godhead and the uni- 
versal subordination of all things to the one great principle for 
which he evolved and was supporting creation. I should like 
to be impressed over again, but with such a view of the Deity 
as coalesced and was in harmony with the doctrine of the New 
Testament." 

He was licensed to preach the gospel in 1799. His brother 
writes : " We are at some pains in adjusting his dress, manner, 
&c. ; but he does not seem to pay any great regard to himself." 
Mathematical studies continue to engross his attention. He 
spent a winter in Edinburgh, studied under Robison, for whom 
he entertained a profound reverence, and Stewart, and devoted 
himself to chemistry and moral philosophy. Of Stewart he 
says : " I have obtained a much clearer idea than I ever had of 



Art. liii.] HIS CONVERSION. 395 

the distinctive character of Reid's philosophy. I think it tends 
to a useless multiplication of principles, and shrinks even from 
an appearance of simplicity." He was ordained minister at 
Kilmany, in his native county, in 1803. He still contrived to 
teach mathematics and chemistry in St. Andrews, — a divided 
work from which he would have shrunk in later years, when 
he attained a higher idea of the importance of the ministerial 
office. In 1806, Napoleon Bonaparte issued his famous Berlin 
decree, shutting continental ports to British goods. Chalmers 
had all along a predilection for political economy : he was 
convinced that Great Britain had resources which made it in- 
dependent of any other country, and in 1807 he published " An 
Inquiry into the Extent and Stability of National Resources." 

We are now approaching the crisis of his life. In 181 8 he 
was required to write an article for the " Edinburgh Encyclo- 
paedia," at that time under the editorship of Dr. Brewster, on 
the " Evidences of Christianity ; " and he had to study the Chris- 
tian religion and the proof which can be adduced in its favor 
more carefully and earnestly than he had ever done before. 
Meanwhile there occurred a number of deaths among his rela- 
tives, and he was deeply affected. He now felt himself called 
on to strive after a pure and heavenly morality. "March 17, 
1 8 10, — I have this day completed my thirtieth year ; and, upon 
a review of the last fifteen years of my life, I am obliged to ac- 
knowledge that at least two-thirds of that time have been use- 
lessly or idly spent, sometimes to while away an evening in 
parish gossip or engaging in a game at cards." A change has 
evidently come over him : he did not yet open it fully, but he 
made allusions to it. " I find that principle and reflection 
afford a feeble support against the visitations of melancholy." 
He was subjected to a period of confinement, and was led to 
read Wilberforce's " Practical View." " The conviction was now 
wrought in him that he had been attempting an impossibility ; 
that he had been trying to compound elements which would 
not amalgamate ; that it must be either on his own merits 
wholly or on Christ's merits wholly he must lean." He now 
betook himself in earnest to the study of the Bible. A visible 
change appeared in him. He became more diligent in the visi- 
tation of his parish, and his sermons had a power over his peo- 
ple such as they never had before. 



39 6 THOMAS CHALMERS. [Art. liii. 

One so able, so earnest, must take an active part in the 
affairs of his country and of his age. He sets out with an ex- 
cessive admiration of the parochial system of Scotland, not just 
as an end in itself, but as fitted to accomplish the ends which 
his great heart cherished. It seemed to him to provide every 
thing which the good and the elevation of a country required. 
It secured a school in every parish, and a minister to preach to 
and to visit every man and woman, and a body of assistant 
elders to watch over the morals of the community. It pro- 
vided, too, for the wants of the poor by a voluntary relief which 
did not interfere with their spirit of independence. The whole 
system bulked in magnificent proportions before his splendid 
imagination. No doubt he saw that the church was not real- 
izing this pattern : he knew that there were ministers around 
him who were not fulfilling these high ends. But then the 
church, by the exercise of the high prerogatives given it by 
Christ, could restrain the evils of patronage, and carry out 
thoroughly the original design of the Church of Scotland. 
He did not foresee the difficulties he would have to meet in 
carrying out his grand ideal, — difficulties arising from the 
State, which did not wish too zealous and too powerful a 
Church, and on the part of the people, who were jealous of 
too strong an ecclesiastical organization. 

He was called to Glasgow in 1815, and there labored with all 
his might to put his idea in execution, first in the Tron Church 
and then in St. John's Church, — built expressly for him. He 
preached as no man in Glasgow had ever preached before. He 
visited from house to house, and thus became aware of, 
and hastened to proclaim to all men, the awfully degraded con- 
dition to which Glasgow, and, as was soon discovered by others, 
to which all the great cities in Scotland and England had 
been reduced. The world, as well it might, was startled and 
awed by the scene disclosed. The philosophers had made no 
inquiry into the subject, and had no remedy for the evil. The 
refined city ministers were satisfied with preaching well-com- 
posed sermons, moral or evangelical, to the better classes. The 
dissenters ministered zealously to their own select congregations, 
but were not able for the Herculean task of cleansing the im- 
purity which had been accumulating for ages. But the evils 
must be remedied. So he set about erecting chapels, and 



Art. liit.] HIS CHURCH PRINCIPLES. 397 

called on the paternal government to endow them. But he met 
with opposition from statesmen not willing to tax the commu- 
nity for the benefit of one sect, and from dissenters who be- 
lieved that their own method of spreading the gospel was the 
better. The voluntary question was started, and he threw him- 
self into the fight, and defended religious establishments on the 
ground that man, being carnal, would not seek for spiritual 
things, which could not, therefore, be left to the ordinary politi- 
cal principle of demand and supply, — thereby, as some of us 
think, overlooking the power in the living converted members 
of the church, who are more likely than the State to supply what 
is wanted to the careless and the outcast. He certainly did 
not estimate, as he ought to have done, the enmity of the 
world toward the church, — an enmity which met him at every 
point. But he persevered manfully, never losing sight of his 
grand aim. His course may seem an inconsistent one to a 
superficial observer ; but there was a unity given to it by 
the end which he pursued as steadfastly as the sun moves in 
the heavens above the winds and clouds of the earth. He must 
have the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ preached to every crea- 
ture, and he supported the Established Church as fitted to ac- 
complish this end, at the same time holding resolutely by the 
spiritual independence of the church as given it by Christ, and 
as necessary to enable it to fulfil its grand ends. And when he 
found that the church he so loved was interfered with in carry- 
ing out its designs, he went on bravely to the disruption of 
1843, and amidst convulsions led on an exodus towards a land 
which he saw before him, but into which he could scarcely be 
said to enter. Ere he departed in 1847, ne na -d by his wisdom 
established a sustentation fund for the benefit of the minis- 
ters of religion, which he hoped would secure the stability and 
other benefits of an established church without its tempta- 
tions. He lived to see churches multiplied by means of the 
secession far beyond his most sanguine expectations ; but he 
did not live to see such a union among churches as is fitted to 
secure the grand end which he kept ever before him, — the 
spread of the gospel in all the destitute and depraved districts 
of the land. 

I regard Chalmers as the greatest preacher which Scotland 
has produced. Those who have heard him can never forget 



398 THOMAS CHALMERS. [Art. liii. 

the impression he produced. As he spoke, he stood firm upon 
his legs, and looked with a broad, honest face on his audience. 
At first there was a flabbiness, a sort of cheesiness, about his 
look and a blankness in his expression ; but he uttered a clear, 
broad, emphatic sentence, and gained the attention of his 
hearers ; and as he advanced he was evidently interested him- 
self and thoroughly interested the congregation ; and soon he 
became absorbed as did all who listened to him ; and in the 
end there was mind and heart manifested in every member and 
in every action (often uncouth) of his body, and the people 
were carried along to the close by a torrent which they could 
not resist, and to which they enthusiastically yielded. His 
pronunciation was Scotch, — provincially Scotch. His style was 
not pure, not classical, was scarcely English ; but it was his 
own, as is Thomas Carlyle's. It was clear, manly, broad, and 
massive. But when he spoke no one ever thought of his manner 
or language : everybody was so carried along by his earnestness 
and his matter. He commonly began by a clear enunciation 
of some philosophic or moral principle of great practical mo- 
ment, and then proceeded to unfold and illustrate it. He did 
not turn aside himself and he did not distract his hearers by 
the introduction of a variety of topics ; he keeps to his one 
principle, but he presents it under a vast variety of aspects, all 
contributing towards the one impression. He is marching up 
a hill, and he takes us with him ; he often lingers by the way 
and gives us glorious retrospects of the ground we have trav- 
ersed and glorious prospects of the heights to which he is to 
conduct us, and he carries us at last to a lofty height with a 
magnificent scene spread all around. The result is that he has 
gained our convictions : he has done more, we are ready, by 
the impulse he has given, to execute what he proposes. At the 
close, as we feel that he has forgot himself, so we forget our- 
selves, and forget him as a speaker in an admiration of the 
truth he has expounded or an eager desire to perform what he 
has inculcated. What he has said has become incorporated 
with us, like food to strengthen us and go with us. He 
has planted a principle in the heads and hearts of his hearers 
to continue there for ever, to send out roots downward and 
stems and branches upward. The consequence was, that, if he 
was not the most intellectual or emotional speaker of his age, 



Art. liii.] HIS THEOLOGY. 399 

he was the most practically influential, spreading his power 
over the length and breadth of Scotland. 

Even in the most active operations, and the keenest contro- 
versies thereby excited, he retained his academic and philo- 
sophic tastes. He delivered in 18 15-16 his " Astronomical Dis- 
courses," which drew on week-days the busiest Glasgow mer- 
chants from their offices and warerooms. In these discourses 
he obviates the prepossession apt to be created and fostered in 
intelligent and refined minds by the Scripture doctrine of the 
Son of God dying for man, and he does so by showing how 
great care God takes of the most minute objects and events. 
In most of his sermons he proceeds upon and unfolds some im- 
portant philosophic principle. In his " Mercantile Discourses " 
he lays down the moral principles of business transactions, and 
shows how a rigid attention to them would restrain injurious 
speculation and promote a healthy trade. In those on " Human 
Depravity," he proves that there may be the deepest sinfulness 
in hearts which yet have many amiabilities. In his "Commen- 
tary on the Epistle to the Romans," he is not always able to 
enter into the thoughts of the apostle, or follow him in his 
subtle transitions ; but he powerfully defends the grand doc- 
trines of revelation by showing that they are sustained by a 
profound philosophy. His doctrine, drawn from Scripture, is 
substantially that of the old Scotch divines from Knox 
downwards : but every one feels that it is pervaded by a new 
and fresh spirit ; it has less of a stern aspect ; it is tolerant ; it 
is catholic. The stream has descended from the stern rocks of 
the sixteenth, and is sweeping along amid the fertility of the 
nineteenth, century. 

I never met any man who had so large a veneration for all 
that is great and good. It was primarily a veneration of God, 
and derivatively for all excellence. He had a profound rever- 
ence for royalty, for greatness, for rank and station ; was essen- 
tially a conservatist in politics ; and felt very keenly when by 
his unflinching adherence to principle he seemed to be separat- 
ing the upper classes from the Church of Scotland. Without 
being a hero-worshipper, for he worshipped God only, he had a 
great admiration of intellectual greatness, at least when it was 
associated with humility. He never wearied to dilate on the 
greatness of Sir Isaac Newton, and often introduced him some- 



400 THOMAS CHALMERS. [Akt. liii. 

what inappropriately. Jonathan Edwards he admired for his 
profound metaphysical ability and his consuming piety ; and he 
employed the arguments of that great man on behalf of philo- 
sophical necessity to support, what is a different thing, the 
Scripture doctrine of predestination. But the author from 
whom he derived most, and who again was indebted to him for 
eloquent expositions of his philosophy, was Bishop Butler. ' He 
was vastly impressed with his enlarged views and with his cau- 
tious, practical wisdom ; and learned from him the habit of 
connecting nature and revelation. 

With such tastes and aims we can conceive that he would 
look with a favorable predilection towards the occupation of an 
academic position. So in 1823 he accepted the call to become 
professor of moral philosophy in the University of St. Andrews. 
Here he exercised a very great influence in attracting students, 
in exciting a prodigious enthusiasm among them, and in set- 
ting them forth with high purposes to noble works. He gained 
the position of highest influence when he was appointed in 
1827 to the chair of theology in the University of Edinburgh. 
I am not sure that Scotland has ever had a higher instructor 
than Chalmers, in respect of all the qualities that go to consti- 
tute a successful teacher. He was always well prepared : he 
was as orderly as a mathematician could be ; even his very 
prayers were often written out. He was a very methodical 
examiner on his text-books and his lectures, having his very 
questions ready, but departing from his prepared queries when 
circumstances required. As a lecturer he did more than de- 
light his audience : he entranced them. They gazed upon 
him ; and at times had difficulty in taking notes, they were so 
moved and elevated. He did not carry on his students very 
rapidly or over much ground ; but he made them thorough mas- 
ters of the subject, and imparted an impulse which led them to 
enter fields of their own. He was particularly interesting and 
successful when he was expatiating in the border country which 
lies between theology and philosophy. His course of moral 
philosophy in St. Andrews, and that on natural theology in 
Edinburgh, were particularly relished by all students capable of 
appreciating high truth. He expatiated with great delight on the 
analogies between natural and revealed religion. His special 
lectures on the " Evidences of Christianity " were not so emi- 



Art. liii.] HIS MORAL PHILOSOPHY. 40 1 

nently successful, though they were very valuable. In his 
early and immature work on the " Evidences," he was particu- 
larly anxious to make the whole proof inductive, and missed 
some of those great principles of our moral nature, which, how- 
ever, he afterwards expanded so fully and so effectively in the 
work as it took its later forms. The student feels that he is 
deficient in scholarship, and that he gives us metaphysics when 
he should have presented us with history. In his theology 
proper, it is evident that he is not specially an exegete. No 
one would reckon him a high authority in the exposition of a 
passage of Scripture. But he presents the great truths of the 
Bible in noble and attractive forms. His creed is essentially 
Calvinistic ; that is, he holds by the same views as Calvin 
drew out of the Scriptures ; but they appear with a more hu- 
mane and benignant aspect, and with a more thorough con- 
formity to the principles of man's nature. 

In his philosophical works he unfolds and enforces a number 
of very important principles, not, it may be, absolutely original, 
but still fresh and independent in his statement and illustra- 
tion of them, and setting aside error on the one side or other. 
His " Sketches of Moral and Mental Philosophy " cannot be 
said to be a. full work on ethics, but it enforces great truths in 
a very impressive and eloquent way. He draws the distinction 
between mental and moral philosophy : the one has to do with 
quid est, and the other with quid oportet. He holds by the dis- 
tinction between will and desire, maintaining that the former 
may be moral or immoral, whereas the latter is not. It seems 
to me that he has scarcely hit on the essential ethical distinc- 
tion, which is not between will and desire, but between emo- 
tion and will ; the latter of which may embrace not only 
volition, but wishes; in short, every thing optative, everything 
in which is choice. He treats of the emotions, and shows 
that there is always a conception (the better expression is 
phantasm) involved in them. He dwells on the command 
which the will has over the emotions and of the morality of 
the emotions. Nothing is either virtuous or vicious unless the 
voluntary in some way intermingles with it ; but then the will 
has influence over a vast number of the operations of the mind. 
" It may be very true that the will has as little to do with that 
pathological law by which the sight of distress awakens in my 

26 



402 THOMAS CHALMERS. [Art. liii. 

bosom an emotion of pity, as with that other pathological law 
by which the sight of a red object impresses on my retina the 
sensation peculiar to that color ; yet the will, though not the 
proximate, may have been the remote, and so the real cause 
both of the emotion and sensation notwithstanding. It may 
have been at the bidding of my will that, instead of hiding my- 
self from my own flesh, I visited a scene of wretchedness, and 
entered within the confines, as it were, of the pathological in- 
fluence, in virtue of which, after that the spectacle of suf- 
fering was seen, the compassion was unavoidable." He has 
very just remarks, propounded with great eloquence, on the 
final cause of the emotions. 

His views on natural theology appeared first in the " Bridge- 
water Treatise," on " The Adaptation of External Nature to 
the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man." The feeling 
of admiration excited was mingled with disappointment. The 
bulk was too great for the matter, and the work had the ap- 
pearance of a hasty recooking of his old thoughts which were 
grand in themselves, but were not formed into a duly propor- 
tioned whole. His arguments and his illustrations have a much 
better form given them in his subsequently published work, — 
" Natural Theology." He begins with a discussion of the a 
priori argument for the existence of God, and examines Samuel 
Clarke's " Demonstration." He objects that Clarke would make 
the test of a logical and mathematical truth to be also the test 
of a physical necessity in the existent state of actual nature, 
and that he confounds a logical with a physical impossibil- 
ity. He turns to the a posteriori argument, but is obliged, 
without his being aware of it, to call in an a priori principle. 
"The doctrine of innate ideas in the mind is totally different 
from the doctrine of innate tendencies in the mind, which ten- 
dencies may be undeveloped till the excitement of some occa- 
sion have manifested or brought them forth." He proceeds, as 
every one must, in constructing the argument from design, on 
the principle of cause and effect, but identifies that principle 
with what is surely a different thing, — with the expectation of a 
uniformity in the succession of events. At this point he draws 
the distinction, which has been accepted by J. S. Mill, and has 
ever since been identified with Chalmers's name, between the 
laws of matter and the collocations of matter. It is from the 



Art. liii.] HIS NATURAL THEOLOGY. 403 

collocations of matter rather than the laws of matter that he 
draws his argument for the divine existence. The distinction 
seems to be deep in the constitution of things, but might be 
better represented, perhaps, as the distinction between the 
properties of matter and the dispositions of matter, these dis- 
positions manifesting design, and consequently intelligence. 

He is most successful when he is arguing from the constitu- 
tion of the human mind. He dwells with great fondness and 
force on the supremacy of conscience and the inherent pleasure 
of virtuous and the misery of vicious affections, and gives a 
powerful exposition of the law of habit. He has a clear, mas- 
terly, and eloquent exposition of Leibnitz's theory of the origin 
of evil, not positively adopting it, but using it as an hypothesis 
to obviate objections. Here and elsewhere he unfolds a very 
favorite principle, that hypotheses may be advanced in theol- 
ogy to answer objections even when they do not establish pos- 
itive truth. The logical meaning of this principle is, that the 
hypothesis sets aside the unlimited major premise necessary 
to establish the infidel objection. He seeks to answer the ob- 
jection to prayer drawn from the uniformity and fixed charac- 
ter of the laws of nature by showing that we can trace the 
agencies of nature only a little way back, and that interferences 
may take place in that outer region which lies beyond the ken 
of man. It may be replied that, by just inference, we can trace 
the agencies far beyond the immediate inspection of man, and 
that we find them everywhere uniform. It might be wiser in 
these circumstances to trace up both the prayer and its answer 
to the pre-established harmony of things appointed by God. 
He closes his work by showing that natural theology is as use- 
ful in exhibiting man's needs, and thus preparing him to receive 
the remedial complement supplied by the Bible, as even in the 
positive truths which it has established. 

We have seen in the cases of Stewart, Brown, and Mackintosh 
what difficulties those trained in the Scottish metaphysics 
had in comprehending the German philosophy and accepting 
the truth. Hamilton, we shall find, labored to combine the 
two. Chalmers, meanwhile, was engrossed with philanthropic 
work ; he did not understand the German language, and it was 
not till the last year of his life, when he got a little lull in 1847 
after the disruption storm, that he became acquainted with the 



404 THOMAS CHALMERS. [Art. liii. 

German philosophy, to which he was introduced by Mr. J. D. 
Morell's well-written and interesting work, " An Historical 
and Critical View of the Speculative Philosophy of Europe in 
the Nineteenth Century." He entered on the study with a 
youthful enthusiasm, and reviewed the work in the " North 
British Review." " It is long since any work has made its ap- 
pearance before a public in a state of greater expectancy and 
readiness for its lessons." With a mind of singular openness 
and candor, he is ready to receive whatever truth Kant and the 
Germans may offer. He confesses his gratification on finding, 
" amid all these conflicting systems and speculations, that our 
theology is safe." He rejoices to find profound points of agree- 
ment between Reid and Kant, and is willing to take the truth 
in either form. " Now, for comparing the Scottish and Ger- 
man philosophies, whether as it respects their similarities or 
their differences, it is of importance to mark how these primary 
beliefs of Dr. Reid are at one with the primitive judgments of 
Kant, or with his forms of the understanding. They may have 
been the better named by the latter of these two philosophers ; 
he may have probed more deeply into their foundations, or, 
rather, perhaps, into their method of development ; he may 
have constructed a fuller and more accurate list of them, and, 
without pronouncing on his scheme for their application, or by 
which he would bring his categories to bear on the objects of 
the external world, it might be fully conceded that, altogether, 
he has enlarged and in some respects amended the philosophy of 
Dr. Reid. Yet let us not, because of the altered nomenclature, 
or of the new garb that has been thrown over them, overlook the 
substantial identity, and that, in respect of almost all, between 
the principles of the Scottish school and those from which 
Kant has earned his chief reputation." It is clear that he was 
not sufficiently far advanced in his knowledge of Kant and of 
the German philosophy to discover that there was a subtle 
scepticism in the philosophy which made the forms of the rea- 
son merely subjective ; whereas Reid gave them an objective 
validity, an external validity when they related to external ob- 
jects. 

With great shrewdness he seizes on an incipient error, which 
has since grown into a formidable error. " We demur to the 
proposed substitution of Mr. Morell for Dr. Reid.'s account 



Art. liii.] PHILOSOPHIC DISTINCTIONS. 405 

of perception, that it is altogether an act of the mind. He 
affirms that the very essence of perception consists in the 
felt relation between mind and matter. And what we affirm is, 
that matter might be perceived, and, with the strongest sense 
and conviction in the mind of its reality, when the mind itself 
is altogether out of the reckoning." " It is not more necessary 
to be conscious of the mind in the business of perceiving than 
to be conscious of the eye in the business of seeing." " We 
can perceive without thinking of the mind, as we can perceive 
without thinking of the eye ; " and he complains of the " undue 
mixing up of the subjective with the objective, in which chiefly 
it is that the erratic movements of the German philosophy 
have taken rise." He here opposes at the entrance that doc- 
trine of relativity which was developed by Hamilton, and has 
been applied by Herbert Spencer. 

He also makes good use of the distinction, as drawn by M. 
Cousin, between the spontaneous and the reflex exercises of 
the human understanding. " We have long been in the habit 
of recognizing these under the title of the mind's direct and 
reflex processes, and we shall continue so to name them." 
" Though it be only by looking inwardly or looking back upon 
ourselves that we take cognizance of our various beliefs, these 
beliefs must be formed so as to exist ere they can be recognized 
or reflected on." So he blames Mr. Morell for constantly " mix- 
ing up consciousness and the facts of consciousness," and M. 
Cousin for finding the ground of our belief in an external world 
in a subjective act. " He looks for it, and imagines that he 
has got his first hold of it among the reflections of the psycho- 
logical tablet within, whereas, if it is to be had at all, spon- 
taneous as it is, it will be the primary act of looking direct on 
that radiance that cometh from the object of contemplation 
without." In following this train of thought he comes near to, 
and yet does not reach, a distinction on which I set great value, 
— the distinction between our primitive apperceptions or intui- 
tions as they spontaneously act and as they are generalized 
into maxims, axioms, or fundamental truths by the metaphysi- 
cian. Considered under the first aspect, they act whether we 
observe them or no, and act best when, like the physiological 
processes of breathing, they are not noticed, and they cannot in 
any circumstances be supposed to err ; whereas under the other 



406 JOHN ABERCROMBTE. [Art. liv. 

aspect they are the result of a discursive process of abstraction 
and generalization, in which there may be much error, by our 
adding to, or taking from, or mutilating the spontaneous pro- 
cess in the reflex account given of it by those who would put 
what is concrete and individual into a universal form. 

This was one of the last compositions of Thomas Chalmers, 
who was found dead in his bed on the morning of May 31, 
1847. His soul was transparently ready for the new truth to 
be disclosed to him in heaven, where what he saw as through 
a glass darkly on earth, appeared to him face to face. 



\Xyr. — JOHN ABERCROMBIE. 

Can mental science be made popular and practical ? It is certainly desir- 
able that it should* become so. It is of moment that the great body of edu- 
cated men and women, in knowing something of history and physics, should 
also be acquainted with the laws of their own mind, and this though they 
have no predilection for the abstruse discussions of metaphysics. We 
have admirable compends of physical science made comprehensible to the 
common understanding. If we are to preserve the intelligent mind of the 
country from falling under the influence of the advancing materialism, we 
should have like expositions of mental and moral investigation for the use 
of upper schools, male and female, and the reading population who have 
not the advantage of a collegiate education. We have such works in Aber- 
crombie's " Intellectual Powers " (1830) and his " Philosophy of the Moral 
Feelings " (1833). He proceeds throughout on the method of Reid, and 
his treatises summarize some of the best results of the philosophy of Scot- 
land. They are also valuable for the admirably reported cases illustrative 
of the influence of mind on body and body on mind. Nor is it to be 
omitted that there runs through all his works a vein of evangelical piety, 
decisive and outspoken without being offensive. 

He was the son of a minister of the Church of Scotland, and was born at 
Aberdeen in 1780. He studied medicine in the University of Edinburgh, 
and became, after the death of Dr. Gregory, the most eminent Scotch phy- 
sician of his time, being distinguished for his great skill and judgment. 
He wrote a number of medical works, treating of the brain ; spinal cord, and 
of disease. He died in 1844. 

In his " Intellectual Powers," he begins with stating what he regards as 
the object of science : it is to observe facts and trace their relations. He 
here treats of cause and effect, which he confounds with the uniformity of 
nature. He makes our belief in it an original instinct, but awkwardly 
brings observation and inference as involved in it. He distinguishes, in 
the manner of Reid and Stewart, between physical and efficient cause, re- 



Art. lit.] INTELLECTUAL POWERS. 407 

garding the former as the only object of philosophic inquiry. He opposes 
materialism, but not very effectively. He then treats of the faculties of 
the mind arranging them : sensation and perception, consciousness and re- 
flection, memory, abstraction, imagination, reason or judgment. Under 
the last he treats of first truths. But by far the most interesting and use- 
ful parts of his works are those in which he treats of the practical applica- 
tion of metaphysical subjects, as, for instance, of the laws of investigation, 
of fallacies, attention. He is in his own field when he is illustrating dream- 
ing, somnambulism, spectral illusions, and insanity. He makes a most use- 
ful application of the whole to the study of medicine. His statement of 
cases may always be depended on for its accuracy. I may give a few ex- 
amples. He says of Dr. Leyden that he could repeat correctly a long act 
of parliament, or any similar document, after having once read it. When 
he was on one occasion congratulated by a friend on his remarkable power 
in this respect, he replied that, instead of an advantage, it was often a 
source of great inconvenience. This he explained by saying that when he 
wished to recollect a particular point in any thing which he had read, he 
could do it only by repeating to himself the whole from the commencement 
till he reached the point which he wished to recall. Again, " a distin- 
guished theatrical performer, in consequence of the sudden illness of 
another actor, had occasion to prepare himself in a few hours' notice for a 
part which was entirely new to him, and the part was long and rather diffi- 
cult. He acquired it in a very short time, and went through it with perfect 
accuracy, but immediately after the performance forgot it to such a degree 
that, though he performed the character for several days in succession, he 
was obliged every day to study it anew. Characters which he had acquired 
in a more deliberate manner he never forgets, but can perform them at any 
time without a moment's preparation. When questioned respecting the 
mental process which he employed the first time he performed this part, he 
says that he lost sight entirely of the audience, and seemed to have nothing 
before him but the pages of the book from which he had learned, and that 
if any thing had occurred to stop this illusion, he should have stopped in- 
stantly." I may give another instance. " A lady, in the last stage of 
chronic disease, was carried from London to a lodging in the country ; 
there her infant daughter was taken to visit her, and, after a short inter- 
view, carried back to town. The lady died a few days after, and the 
daughter grew up without any recollection of her till she was of mature 
age. At this time she happened to be taken into the room in which her 
mother died without knowing it to have been so. She started on entering 
it, and, when a friend who was along with her asked the cause of her agi- 
tation, replied : ' I have a distinct impression of having been in this room 
before, and that a lady who lay in that room, and seemed very ill, leaned 
over me and wept' " 

The work on the " Moral Feelings " does not seem to me so valuable, 
and this because he cannot, in treating of such a subject, have so many of 
those cases which he as a medical man had so carefully noted. But it is 
characterized by a fine spirit, and it has a useful tendency. He has some 
important remarks on the " Analogy between first Truths or Intuitive Prin- 



408 DA VID WELSH. [Art. lv. 

ciples of Belief in Intellectual and Moral Science." " In applying to these 
important articles of belief the name of first truths or primary principles of 
moral conviction, I do not mean to ascribe to them any thing of the nature 
of innate ideas. I mean only that they come with a rapid or instantaneous 
conviction, entirely distinct from what we call a process of reasoning in 
every well-regulated mind, when it is directed by the most simple course of 
reflection to the phenomena of nature without and to the moral feelings of 
which it is conscious within." In his analysis of man as a moral being, he 
includes: I. The desires, the affections, and self-love; 2. The will; 3. 
Moral principle or conscience ; 4. The moral relation of man towards the 
Deity. The discussion of these subjects is not very deep or original, but it 
is commonly correct and always useful. 



IN. — DAVID WELSH. 1 

At the time we have now reached there was a strong reaction against mod- 
eratism and rationalism, and a tendency to return to the simple faith of the 
Bible ; and a reconciliation of Scotch philosophy and evangelism was openly 
proclaimed. Ministers from the pulpit, and theologians in the divinity 
halls, were employing the principles of the mind and of morality to support 
the peculiar truths of Christianity. If there be a moral law, it points to a 
law-giver. If that law be immutable and unbending, it shows that man is 
a sinner ; it points to the need of an atonement, and requires such evan- 
gelical graces as humility, faith, and repentance. We have a fine exempli- 
fication of this union of philosophy and evangelism in Dr. David Welsh. 

He belonged to a "God-fearing" family residing in that somewhat bare 
but romantic sheep country in which the rivers Clyde, Tweed, and Annan 
rise. He was born Dec. 11, 1793, was educated first by a private tutor, 
next at the parish school of Moffat, then at the high school of Edinburgh, 
and thence went to the university. There he fell, in 1808-9, under the 
attractive influence of Dr. Brown, " who admitted him to much and intimate 
intercourse, directed him in his private studies, discussed with him the 
subjects of his reading, and aided in cultivating his taste for polite litera- 
ture." When in the university he devoted himself carefully to composition, 
and afterwards recommended the habit to his pupils. " I cannot conceive 
it possible for a young man to think very closely or profoundly upon any 
subject if he does not commit his thoughts to paper. A confused idea, a 
kind of half comprehension, a partial glimpse of any subject, will satisfy 
every person — I mean every young person — who has not to make an 
immediate use of his information upon that subject. But if you have to 
write upon the subject, an indefinite conception will not suffice : the cur- 
rent of your thoughts is arrested ; you are compelled calmly and deliber- 
ately to revolve and to consider, and the consequence necessarily must be 
that you arrive at clear and comprehensive views." 

1 " Memoir of Dr. Welsh," by Alexander Dunlop, Esq., prefixed to his 
Sermons. 



Art. lv.] HIS LIFE OF BROWN. 409 

He was licensed to preach in 1816, but in these days of patronage did 
not get a church till 1821, when he was settled in Crossmichael, a peaceful 
country parish among the hills of Galloway. There he was a much beloved 
and respected pastor for six years, and there he wrote his life of Dr. 
Brown. In 1827 he became minister of St. David's, Glasgow, and was 
soon very influential as a preacher. " His delivery wanted some of 
those outward graces which often gloss over defect in matter. He was far 
from fluent; and indeed he preached apparently with effort. In conse- 
quence of the weakness of his chest, there was often a straining in the 
getting out his words, which was at times painful to the listener ; though 
it added to, rather than detracted from, the earnestness with which his dis- 
courses were delivered." He gathered a large congregation of thoughtful 
people, including not a few students of Glasgow University, who were de- 
lighted with his clear, chaste language, his fine reflection, and his warm 
piety. He was a noble example of a philosopher, teaching, not philosophy, 
but the doctrines of the cross, always in a philosophic manner and spirit. 
In 1831 he was elected professor of church history in the university of 
Edinburgh, where he was a conscientious, careful teacher, and a discerner 
and patron of young men of promise. He did not take a very prominent 
part in church politics, but was a consistent opponent of church patronage, 
and a firm supporter of popular rights and the spiritual independence of the 
church. He was moderator of the general assembly of the Church of Scot- 
land in 1842. which passed a solemn " claim, declaration, and protest against 
the encroachment of the civil courts." In 1843 ^ e na -d to preach at the 
opening of the assembly, and took as his text, " Let every one be fully 
persuaded in his own mind ; " and delivered a sermon, through which there 
runs a vein of fine philosophy. After reading the protest he headed the 
imposing procession of ministers, who marched through the streets of Edin- 
burgh tothe Canonmills Hall. In the Free Church of Scotland he especially 
interested himself in the cause of education. He died April 24, 1845. 

In his life of Brown we have a very interesting account of the man, and 
an able abstract of his philosophy. He gives a full and fair statement of 
the favorite tenets of Brown, and defends them from objections which have 
been taken to them. He dwells with fondness on the additions which 
Brown is regarded as making to philosophy by his theory of causation, by 
his analysis of the faculties, by his account of suggestion simple and rela- 
tive, and specially of generalization. As might be expected of one who had 
felt the fascination and enjoyed the eloquence of his master, he over-esti- 
mates his merits. '' In the philosophic love of truth, and in the patient 
investigation of it, Dr. Brown may be pronounced as at least equal, and in 
subtlety of intellect and powers of analysis as superior, to any metaphysician 
that ever existed. Or if there ever was any philosopher who might dispute 
with him the palm for any one of these qualities, of this at least I am cer- 
tain, — that no one ever combined them all in equal perfection." 

It was hoped by many that Dr. Welsh would write a philosophic work 
of his own. But he became " fully convinced of the substantial truth of the 
doctrines originally published by Dr. Gall." He is careful to explain : " The 
cerebral organs are not the mind, nor is any state of these organs the mind. 



410 JOHN WILSON. [Art. lvi. 

The mind we believe to be a simple and indivisible substance." In a 
sketchy article in an early number of the " North British Review," of which 
he was editor at the time, he showed that he was able to grapple with the 
deeper problems of the day. We see in all his sermons and papers an 
underlying philosophy gendered by the study of the Scottish school. But 
his energy was directed to preaching, to lecturing on church history, and 
to philanthropic objects. 



INl. — JOHN WILSON. 1 

At the end of last century, Paisley had a considerable body of high-class 
citizens who made money and benefited their town by turning cotton into 
gauze and other useful products. John Wilson was the son of one of these, 
and was born in 1785 in by no means a poetical spot in a dingy court at the 
head of the High Street. We can believe that the boy was " as beautiful 
and animated a creature as ever played in the sunshine." He received his 
education first in his native town, and then at the manse of Mearns, — a 
bare, wild upland district, fitted to call forth a sense of freedom, but with 
nothing grand or romantic in its scenery. On the death of his father he 
entered as a student in Glasgow University, and continued there till 1803. 
In future years he acknowledged in " Blackwood " his obligations to Jar- 
dine as "a person who, by the singular felicity of his tact in watching 
youthful minds, had done more good to a whole host of individuals, and 
gifted individuals too, than their utmost gratitude could ultimately repay. 
They spoke of him as a kind, intellectual father, to whom they were proud 
of acknowledging the eternal obligations of their intellectual being." He 
indulged freely in dinners, balls, and parties ; but Glasgow College made its 
students work, and Wilson was an ardent student. He began to keep a 
diary, and we have an entry : " Prize for the best specimens of the Socratic 
mode of reasoning given out in the logic." " Got the first prize in the logic 
class." Prizes have always been numerous, often not very discriminating 
in their subjects, in Glasgow College, and he records : " Prizes distributed ; 
got three of them." 

In all his youthful days he luxuriated in fishing and field sports, and no- 
body could match him at "hop, step, and jump." At an early age ; when 
the " Edinburgh Review " was ridiculing Wordsworth, Wilson was seized 
with an admiration of him, and wrote him: "In all your poems you 
have adhered to natural feelings, and described what comes within the 
range of every one's observation. It is from following this plan that, in 
my estimation, you have surpassed every poet both of ancient and modern 
times." Yet he ventures to hint a fault. " No feeling, no state of mind, 
ought, in my mind, to become the subject of poetry that does not please." 

1 " Christopher North. A Memoir of John Wilson, by his daughter, Mrs. 
Gordon." 



Art. lvi.] VIRTUAL EDITOR OF "BLACKWOOD." 41 1 

Hn 1803 he entered, as a gentleman commoner, Magdalen College, Oxford, 
and participated ardently both in the high studies and in the boating and 
physical sports. Here he began a common-place book, which was doubt- 
less of great use to him : " In the following pages I propose to make such 
remarks upon the various subjects of polite literature as have been sug- 
gested to my mind during the course of my studies by the perusal of writers 
on the different branches of human knowledge ; reflections upon law, history, 
philosophy, theology, and poetry, will be classed under separate heads." 
" With regard to the department of poetry, original verses of my own com- 
position will be frequently introduced." " Should any reflections upon 
men and authors occur in my mind, even with regard to the general char- 
acters of mankind, or the particular dispositions of acquaintances and 
friends, they shall be written down as they occur, without any embellish- 
ment. In short, this common-place book, or whatever else it maybe called, 
will contain, so far as it goes, a faithful representation of the state of my 
mind, both in its moments of study and retirement." 

^ At the close of his Oxford life he passed, in 1806, a brilliant examina- 
tion. " Sotheby was there, and declared it was worth while coming from 
London to hear him translate a Greek chorus." On leaving college, hav- 
ing, as he believed, an independent fortune, he betook himself to the Lake 
country of England, and purchased Elleray, within nine miles of Words- 
worth, and henceforth may be regarded as one of the Lake poets. He now 
divided his activities between poetry and rural sports, and " had a small 
fleet on Windermere." By 1810 he had written as many poems " as will 
make a volume of 400 pages," of which the principal was " The Isle of 
Palms," descriptive of sea and island scenery, with a love story. In 181 1 
he was married to Miss Penny. A few years later he lost suddenly the 
fortune which his father had laid up for him so industriously. He bore the 
trial manfully, but had to remove to Edinburgh to the home of his mother, 
and he became an advocate. He did not acquire a large practice at the 
bar, and had time to write novels and poems, which were noticed favorably 
in the " Edinburgh Review." 

Jeffrey asked him to write for the " Edinburgh," and he furnished an 
article on Byron. But Wilson was destined to occupy a place of his own. 
"Blackwood's Magazine" was started in 1817 by others, but did not be- 
come a power till it came under the control of Wilson. He was never 
formal editor. Blackwood retained the management in his own hand ; and, 
knowing that literary men were commonly both needy and dilatory, he kept 
them to punctuality by not remunerating them till they produced the 
articles, and then paying them handsomely. But the winds and the sails 
were given to the vessel by Wilson, and "Blackwood" immediately be- 
came the best literary magazine of its day. 

So that city of Edinburgh is still maintaining its high literary repu- 
tation. In Jeffrey they have a representative of the talent, and in Scott, 
with Wilson in an inferior degree, representatives of the genius of their 
country. The "blue and yellow " is the organ of the one and old " ebony" 
of the other. The one favors taste and judgment ; the other originality 
and literary beauty. The one is seeking to improve things, has no great 



412 JOHN WILSON. [Art. lvi. 

reverence for the wisdom of the ancients, looks forward to the future, and 
is considerably cool and indifferent towards religion ; the other likes things 
as they are, has a profound reverence for old customs and feudal castles, 
and speaks highly of the forms of religion as established by law and cus- 
tom. 

" Blackwood's Magazine " is the great work of Wilson. His tales are 
full of sentiment too ; much in the manner of Mackenzie, — so much so as 
to be at times cloying as treacle. He professes to describe the trials and 
sorrows of the poor ; but it is clear that he paints them as one who, with a 
warm heart, has viewed them at a distance, and who has never truly be- 
come one of them. His poor are certainly not the Scotch poor, with their 
deep feeling, which oppresses them all the more that it cannot get an out- 
let except in brief and restrained phrases, showing that they are repressing 
what should be allowed to flow out. His poetry is certainly beautiful in 
imagery and expression, but has too redundant foliage in proportion to the 
stem and branches which support it, and often wants a healthy air and a 
manly bearing. But the whole soul of Wilson comes out in the " Noctes 
Ambrosianae." We have here an extravaganza full of all excellencies 
and defects, of fun and frolic, wit and humor, fancies and imaginations, 
shrewd wisdom and ingenious nonsense, of offensively personal comment 
and genuine pathos, of drinking, swearing, morality, and religion, — which, 
however, always smells of the whiskey punch of the tavern. The whole is 
a sort of rhapsody which reads like an inspiration, but breathing more of 
the soil of earth than the air of heaven. It is a waste, newly turned up, 
and yielding an exuberance of seeds and trees, flowers and fr.uit ; but with 
weeds and chills and fevers. 

In 1820, when Brown died, there was a keen struggle for the chair of 
moral philosophy. Sir James Mackintosh might have had it, but could 
not resist the temptations of politics and London society. The contest lay 
between Wilson and Sir William Hamilton known already as a scholar, but 
not as an author. The town council was unreformed ; the tories had the 
political power of the city ; they were annoyed by the attacks of Jeffrey and 
jealous of the growing liberal spirit fostered by the philosophical professors 
of the University. So Wilson was started and warmly supported by the 
government. Scott, the literary genius of Edinburgh, threw himself 
thoroughly into the canvass for Wilson, who received the appointment. 
Every one felt that Scottish metaphysics had suffered a reverse ; but some 
rejoiced at this, as feeling that the Scottish colleges were too exclusively 
metaphysical, and introduced students to philosophy at too early an age, 
and they expected Wilson to give an impulse to literary culture. 

We have a record in the " Memoir " of the attempts of the literary man 
and the poet to produce a course of lectures on philosophy. He would 
commence with some attractive and eloquent introductory lectures of a 
" popular though philosophical character, so as to make a good impression 
at first on his students and also on the public," and so he proposes to give 
eight or ten lectures on the moral systems of ancient Greece. Then he is 
to have six or more lectures on the physical nature of man. And now the 
difficulties meet him. Must he tread in the steps of Reid and Stewart, 



Art. lvi.] HIS LECTURES. 4T3 

" which to avoid would be of great importance " ? " Surely," he says, " we 
may contrive to write with more spirit and effect than either of them ; with 
less formality, less caution ; for Stewart seems terrified to place one foot 
before another." Then he would branch forth on taste and genius, which 
he was glad to find had been treated of by the Scotch moralists. Then 
comes the moral nature, the affections, and conscience, or whatever name 
that faculty may be called ; and he anticipates that the passions and affec- 
tions will furnish fine ground for description. Then there is the will and 
all its problems ; " but here I am also in the dark." One more lecture on 
man's spiritual nature will make fifty-eight in all. " I would fain hope that 
something different from the common metaphysical lectures will produce 
itself out of this plan." Then he would treat of duties to God and man ; 
of virtues and vices, — in all, 108 lectures. Such was his projected plan. 
In later years he modified it, giving more time to the moral faculty, on 
which he did not throw any light. 

He was never very systematic in his course. He enlarged on subjects 
suited to him, and was always poetical, often eloquent. The writer of this 
article remembers the impression left as he passed one day into his 
class-room. The students received him with applause. — I believe they 
always did so ; and he advanced in a rapid, genial manner, fresh as if he 
had just come from the Highlands or Lake country. He produced a roll 
of papers, some of them apparently backs of letters. I could not discover 
where he was in his course, but I soon found myself carried along pleas- 
antly but irresistibly by a glowing description of faith, of its swaying and 
elevating influence. On another occasion I found him enlarging on the 
place which association has in forming our imaginations. I am not able 
to give his theory, but it seemed to me at the time fresh and original. His 
pupils felt that it was a stimulating thing to be under such a man. " One 
indubitable advantage," says Mr. Hill Burton, " was possessed by all 
Professor Wilson's students who had 'eyes to see and ears to hear,' viz., 
the advantage of beholding closely the workings of a great and generous 
mind swayed by the noblest and sincerest impulses, and of listening to the 
eloquent utterances of a voice which, reprobating every form of meanness 
and duplicity, was ever raised to its loftiest pitch in recommendation of 
high-souled honor, truth, virtue, disinterested love, and melting charity." 
Another pupil, Mr. A. Taylor Innes, describes him: "His appearance in 
his class-room it is far easier to remember than forget. He strode into it 
with the professor's gown hanging loosely on his arms, took a comprehen- 
sive look over the mob of young faces, laid down his watch so as to be out 
of the reach of his sledge-hammer fist, glanced at the notes of his lecture 
(generally written on the most wonderful scraps of paper), and then, to the 
bewilderment of those who had never heard him before, looked long and 
earnestly out of the north window towards the spire of the old Town Kirk, 
until, having at last got his idea, he faced round and uttered it with eye 
and hand and voice and soul and spirit, and bore the class along with 
him. As he spoke, the bright blue eye looked with a strange gaze into 
vacancy, sometimes sparkling with a coming joke, sometimes darkening 
before a rush of indignant eloquence, the tremulous upper lip curving with 



414 JOHN WILSON. [Art. lvi. 

every wave of thought or hint or passion, and the golden-gray hair floating 
on the old man's shoulders." He had no philosophy himself, and so could 
not impart it to his pupils. But at times he made a profound remark, as 
when, in the "Noctes," he says : "Honesty is the best policy, but it is only 
the honest man who will discover this." Hamilton, who was ardently at- 
tached to the man praises his metaphysical acuteness as shown in a review 
of Brown's theory of cause and effect in " Blackwood " for 1837. 

But his true merit consisted in creating a literary taste among his stu- 
dents. He was not a very rigid examiner or exacter of essays and idle 
students passed through his class without much severe study. But he read 
conscientiously the papers given in to him, and was a discerning critic, 
particularly appreciative of excellence. The more ambitious youths cher- 
ished secretly or avowedly the idea that they might be asked by him to write 
a communication to dear old North for " Blackwood ; " but Wilson had to 
consult the tastes of his readers, and their hopes had often to be disap- 
pointed. 

Thus did he pass his rather lengthened life, ever looking after the maga- 
zine with which he identified himself, lecturing all winter to his students, 
taking excursions in the summer, and very often dining in company in the 
evening where the wine and the wit flowed freely, and where he was always 
the favorite. In 1850 his health began to break down. He retained his 
universal sympathy all along. His ruling passion was strong in death. 
" It was an affecting sight to see him busy, nay, quite absorbed, with the 
fishing tackle scattered about his bed where he lay propped up with pil- 
lows." " How neatly he picked out each elegantly dressed fly from its 
little bunch, drawing it out with trembling hand along the white coverlet, 
and then replacing it in his pocket-book ; he would tell ever and anon of 
the streams he used to fish in of old." The prospect of death produced 
more solemn feelings, and he betook himself to the Bible, "for is not all 
human nature and all human life shadowed forth in these pages?" The 
tender and anxious question which he asked concerning Robert Burns, 
" Did he read his Bible ? " may, perhaps, by some be asked about himself. 
On a little table near his bedside his Bible lay during his whole illness, 
and was read morning and evening regularly. His servant also read it fre- 
quently to him. Thus departed John Wilson, April 2, 1853. 



Art. lvil] SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. 415 



LVII. — SIR WILLIAM HAMIL TON. 1 

He is the most learned of all the Scottish metaphysicians. 
Not that the Scottish school ought to be described, as it has 
sometimes been, as ignorant. Hutcheson was a man of learning, 
as well as of accomplishment, and visibly experienced great de- 
light in quoting the Greek and Roman philosophers, as he walked 
up and down in his class-room in Glasgow. Adam Smith had 
vast stores of information ; and the ground-plan which he has 
left of departments of ancient philosophy, and the sketch of the 
sects which he has given in his " Moral Sentiments," show that 
he was more competent, had he devoted his attention to the 
subject, than any man of his age to write a history of philoso 
phy. Hume had extensive philosophic, as well as historical, 
knowledge ; but he was so accustomed to twist it to perverse 
uses, that we cannot trust his candor or accuracy. Reid was 
pre-eminently a well-informed man. His first printed paper was 
on quantity. He taught in Aberdeen College, according to 
the system of rotation which continued even to his day, natural 
as well as moral philosophy ; and continued, even in his old age, 
to be well read on all topics of general interest. Beattie and 
Campbell were respectable scholars, as well as elegant writers ; 
and the former was reckoned at Oxford, and by the English 
clergy, as the great expounder, in his day, of sound philosophy. 
Lord Monboddo was deeply versed in the Greek and Roman 
philosophies, and in spite of all his paradoxes has often given 
excellent accounts of their systems. Dugald Stewart was a 
mathematician as well as a metaphysician ; and, if not of very 
varied, was of very correct, and, altogether, of very competent, 
ripe, and trustworthy scholarship. Brown was certainly not 
widely or extensively read in philosophy ; but, besides a knowl- 
edge of medicine, he had an acquaintance with Roman and with 
modern French literature. Sir James Mackintosh was famil- 
iar with men and manners, was learned in all social questions, 

1 Article by Thomas Spencer Baynes in " Edinburgh Essays " by members of 
the University of Edinburgh; "Memoir of Sir William Hamilton" by John 
Veitch. 



416 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. [Art. lvii. 

and had a general, though certainly not a very minute or cor- 
rect, knowledge of philosophic systems. But, for scholarship, 
in the technical sense of the term, and, in particular, for the 
scholarship of philosophy, they were all inferior to Hamilton, who 
was equal to any of them in the knowledge of Greek and Roman 
systems, and of the earlier philosophies of modern Europe ; and 
vastly above them in a comprehensive acquaintance with all 
schools ; and standing alone in his knowledge of the more phil- 
osophic fathers, such as Tertullian and Augustine ; of the more 
illustrious schoolmen, such as Thomas Aquinas and Scotus ; of 
the writers of the Revival, such as the elder Scaliger ; and of 
the ponderous systems of Kant, and the schools which ramified 
from him in Germany. 

When he was alive, he could always be pointed to as redeem- 
ing Scotland from the reproach of being without high scholar- 
ship. Oxford had no man to put on the same level. Germany 
had not a profounder scholar, or one whose judgment in a dis- 
puted point could be so relied on. Nor was his the scholarship 
of mere words : he knew the history of terms, but it was because 
he was familiar with the history of opinions. In reading his 
account, for example, of the different meanings which the word 
" idea" has had, and of the views taken of sense-perception, one 
feels that his learning is quite equalled by his power of discrim- 
ination. No man has ever done more in clearing the literature 
of philosophy of common-place mistakes, of thefts and impost- 
ures. He has shown all of us how dangerous it is to quote 
without consulting the original, or to adopt, without examination, 
the common traditions in philosophy ; that those who borrow at 
second hand will be found out ; and that those who steal, with- 
out acknowledgment, will, sooner or later, be detected and 
exposed. He experiences a delight in stripping modern authors 
of their borrowed feathers, and of pursuing stolen goods from 
one literary thief to another, and giving them back to their 
original owner. For years to come, ordinary authors will seem 
learned by drawing from his stores. In incidental discussions, 
in foot-notes, and notes on foot-notes, he has scattered nuts 
which it will take many a scholar many a day to gather and to 
crack. It will be long before the rays which shine from him 
will be so scattered and diffused through philosophic literature — 
as the sunbeams are through the atmosphere — that they shall 



Art. lvii.] HIS LOGICAL POWER. 417 

become common property, and men shall cease to distinguish 
the focus from which they have come. 

The only other decided lineament of his character that I shall 
mention is his logical power, including therein all such exercises 
as abstraction, generalization, division, definition, formal judg- 
ment, and deduction. In this respect he may be placed along- 
side of those who have been most distinguished for this faculty ; 
such as, Aristotle, Saint Thomas, Descartes, Spinoza, Samuel 
Clarke, Kant, and Hegel. In directing his thoughts to a subject, 
he proceeds to divide, distribute, define, and arrange, very much 
in the manner of Aristotle : take, as an example, his masterly 
analysis of the primary qualities of matter. He pursues much 
the same method, in giving the history of opinions, as on the 
subjects of the principles of common sense and perception. No 
man ever displayed such admirable examples of Porphyry's tree, 
reaching from the summum genus to the infima species. It is 
quite clear that, had he lived in the days of the schoolmen, he 
would have ranked with the greatest of them, — with Albertus 
Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and Abelard, — and 
would have been handed down to future generations by such an 
epithet as Doctor Criticus, Doctor Doctissimus, or Doctor In- 
domitabilis. 

Here, however, his strength is his weakness. He attempts far 
too much by logical differentiation and formalization. No man 
purposes now to proceed in physical investigation by logical 
dissection, as was done by Aristotle and the schoolmen. I 
have at times looked into the old compends of physical science 
which were used in the colleges down even to an age after the 
time of Newton. Ingenious they were beyond measure, and 
perfect in form far beyond what Herschel or Faraday have at- 
tempted. I am convinced that logical operations can do nearly as 
little in the mental as they have done in the material sciences. I 
admit that Sir William Hamilton had deeply observed the opera- 
tions of the mind, and that his lectures contribute more largely 
to psychology than any work published in his day. But his in- 
duction is too much subordinated to logical arrangement and 
critical rules. His system will be found, when fully unfolded, 
to have a. completeness such as Reid and Stewart did not pre- 
tend to, but it is effected by a logical analysis and synthesis, and 
much that he has built up will require to be taken down. 

27 



418 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. [Art. lvii. 

We may compare him with the Scotch metaphysician who 
had the greatest reputation when Hamilton determined to claim 
a place for himself. Brown and Hamilton are alike in the fame 
which they attained, in the influence which they exercised 
over young and ardent spirits, in the interest which they 
excited in the study of the human mind, and in their success 
in upholding the reputation of the Scottish colleges for meta- 
physical pursuits : each had an ambition to be independent, 
to appear original and establish a system of his own ; both 
were possessed of large powers of ingenuity and acuteness, 
and delighted to reduce the compound into elements ; and 
each, we may add, had a considerable acquaintance with the 
physiology of the senses : but in nearly all other respects 
they widely diverge, and their points of contrast are more 
marked than their points of correspondence. They differed 
even in their natural disposition. The one was amiable, 
gentle, somewhat effeminate, and sensitive, and not much 
addicted to criticism ; the other, as became the descendant of 
a covenanting hero, was manly, intrepid, resolute, — at times 
passionate, — and abounding in critical strictures, even on those 
whom he most admires. As to their manner of expounding 
their views, there could not be a stronger contrast. Both have 
their attractions ; but the one pleases by the changing hues of 
his fancy and the glow of his sentiment, whereas the other stim- 
ulates our intellectual activity by the sharpness of his discussions, 
and the variety and aptness of his erudition. The one abounds 
in illustrations, and excites himself into eloquence and his read- 
ers into enthusiasm : the other is brief and curt ; seldom giving 
us a concrete example ; restraining all emotion, except it be 
passion at times; never deigning to warm the students by a 
flash of rhetoric ; and presenting only the naked truth, that it 
may allure by its own charms. If we lose the meaning of the 
one, it is in a blaze of light, in a cloud of words, or in repeated 
repetitions : the quickest thinkers are not always sure that they 
understand the other, because of the brevity of his style, and 
the compression of his matter ; and his admirers are found 
poring over his notes, as the ancients did over the responses of 
their oracles. The one helps us up the hill, by many a winding 
in his path, and allows us many a retrospect, when we might 
become weary, and where the view is most expanded ; whereas 



Art. lvii.] BROWN AND HAMILTON. 419 

the other conducts us straight up the steep ascent, and, though 
he knows all the paths by which others have mounted, he ever 
holds directly on ; and if there be not a path made for him, he 
will clear one for himself. Both were eminently successful lect- 
urers : but the one called forth an admiration of himself in the 
minds of his whole class ; whereas the other succeeded in rous- 
ing the energies of select minds, in setting them forth on 
curious research, and in sharpening them for logical dissection. 
One feels, in reading Brown, as if he were filled and satisfied ; 
but sometimes, as he finds in the digestion, the food has been 
far from substantial : whereas we are forced to complain, in 
regard to Hamilton, that he gives us the condensed essence, 
which the stomach feels great difficulty in mastering. The one 
never coins a new technical word, when the phrases in current 
use among the British and French philosophers of the previous 
century will serve his purpose ; the other delights to stamp his 
thoughts with a nomenclature of his own, derived from the 
scholastics or the Germans, or fashioned out of the Greek 
tongue : and so the one feels soft as a bird of delicate plu- 
mage, whereas the other is bristling all over with sharp points 
like a porcupine. The works of the one remind us of Versailles, 
with its paintings, its woods, its fountains,-^ all somewhat arti- 
ficial, but beautiful withal ; those of the other are ruled and 
squared like the pyramids, and look as if they were as lofty, 
and must be as enduring. 

Both were extensive readers : but the reading of the one was 
in the Latin classics, and the works of the well-known authors 
of England and France in the last century ; whereas the other 
ranged over all ancient literature, and over the philosophic 
systems of all ages and countries ; delighted supremely in 
writings which had never been read since the age in which they 
were penned ; troubled many a librarian to shake the dust 
from volumes which no other man had ever asked for ; and 
must, we should think, have gratified the dead, grieving in their 
graves over neglect, by showing them that they were yet re- 
membered. The one delights to show how superior he is to 
Reid, to Stewart, to the Schoolmen, to the Stagyrite ; the other 
rejoices to prove his superior learning by claiming for old, for- 
gotten philosophers the doctrines attributed to modern authors, 
and by demonstrating how much we owe to the scholastic ages 
and to Aristotle. 



420 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. [Art. lvii. 

Both departed so far from the true Scottish school : but the 
one went over to France for refinement and sentiment, the 
other to Germany for abstractions and erudition. If Brown is 
a mixture of the Scottish and French schools, Hamilton is a 
union of the schools of Reid and Kant. Brown thought that 
Reid's influence was too high, and had a secret desire to under- 
mine him and Stewart with him ; Hamilton thought that Brown 
was over-rated, and makes no scruple in avowing that he labors 
to strip him of the false glory in which he was enveloped ; and 
he took up Reid at the time he was being decried in Scotland, 
and allowed no man — but himself — to censure the common- 
sense philosopher. Brown had no sense of the merits of Kant, 
and did his best (along with Stewart) to keep him unknown for 
an age in Scotland ; Hamilton was smitten with a deep admira- 
tion of the great German metaphysician, helped to introduce 
him to the knowledge of Scottish thinkers, was caught in his 
logical network, and was never able thoroughly to extricate 
himself. 

As to their method of investigation, both employ analysis as 
their chief instrument, but the one uses a retort and proceeds 
by a sort of chemical composition, while the other employs a 
lens and works by logical division. In comparison with Reid 
and Stewart, both erred by excess of decomposition and over- 
looked essential parts of the phenomenon ; but the object of the 
one was to resolve all mental states into as few powers as pos- 
sible, whereas the aim of the other was to divide and subdivide 
a whole into parts, which he again distributes into compart- 
ments of a framework provided for them. The one has added 
to the body of philosophy mainly by his acute analyses of con- 
crete phenomena and by his illuminated illustrations of psycho- 
logical laws ; the other by his vast erudition, which enabled 
him to dispose under heads the opinions of all philosophers, 
and by his skill in arranging the facts of consciousness by 
means of logical division and distribution. 

Brown acquired a wide reputation at an early date ; but, like 
those showy members of the female sex who have many 
admirers but few who make proposals of union, he has had 
scarcely any professing to follow him throughout. His most 
distinguished pupil, Dr. Welsh, was possessed of a fine philo- 
sophic spirit, but abandoned Scotch metaphysics for phrenology 
and for theological and ecclesiastical studies. Several eminent 



Art. lvii.] HIS SCHOOL. 421 

men, not pupils, have been influenced by Brown. Payne's work 
on Mental and Moral Science is drawn largely from his lectures. 
Isaac Taylor, in his " Elements of Thought," has adopted some 
of his peculiarities. Chalmers had to prepare his lectures on 
moral philosophy when Brown's name was blazing high in 
Scotland, and, feeling an intense admiration of his eloquence 
and of the purity of his ethical system, has followed him per- 
haps further than he should have done, but has been kept from 
following him in several most important points by his attach- 
ment to Reid and Butler. John Stuart Mill has got the very 
defective metaphysics which underlies and weakens much of 
his logic from his father, James Mill, from Brown, and from 
Comte. Still, Brown has no school and few professed disci- 
ples. It is different with Hamilton. His influence, if not so 
extensive — to use a favorite distinction of his own — has been 
more comprehensive. His articles in the " Edinburgh Review " 
were above the comprehension, and still further above the 
tastes, of the great body even of metaphysical students in Great 
Britain when they appeared between 1829 and 1833. But they 
were tanslated by M. Peisse into the French language, and 
there were penetrating minds in Britain, America, and the 
Continent which speedily discovered the learning and capacity 
of one who could write such dissertations. By the force of his 
genius he raised up a body of pupils ready to defend him and 
to propagate his influence. He has had a school and disciples, 
as the Greek philosophers had in ancient times, and as such 
men as Descartes, Leibnitz, and Kant have had in modern 
times. His pupils employ his distinctions and delight in 
his nomenclature : their speech everywhere " bewrayeth " them. 
Some of them, it is true, remind us of a modern soldier in 
mediaeval coat of mail, and move very cumbrously under the 
ponderous armor of their master ; but, as a whole, they consti- 
tuted an able and influential school of abstract philosophy. Some 
of them seem incapable of looking on any subject except through 
the well-cut lenses which Hamilton has provided for them ; 
others seem dissatisfied with his negative conclusions, and with 
his rejection a la Kant of final cause as a proof of the divine 
existence, but they do not seem to have the courage to examine 
and separate the truth from the error in that doctrine of rela- 
tivity on which his whole system is founded. 



422 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. [Art. lvii. 

While Hamilton has thus been establishing a school and 
acquiring an authority, it has not been without protest. In 
saying so, I do not refer to the criticisms of his attacks on the 
character and doctrines of Luther, which have been repelled by 
Archdeacon Hare and others, but to opposition offered to his 
philosophic principles. There has been a general dissent 
even by disciples, such as Mansel, from his doctrine of 
causation, and, if this tenet is undermined, his elaborate 
scheme of systematized "Conditions of the Thinkable" is laid 
in ruins. Dr. Calderwood has opposed his negative doctrine 
of the infinite. Others, not pupils, have expressed doubts of 
his whole theory of relativity. Ulrici, in the leading philo- 
sophic journal of Germany, " Zeitschrift fiir Philosophie " (1855), 
has charged him with departing in his method from the stand- 
point of Scotland, with giving in to the critical method of Kant, 
and ploughing with the German heifer, and alleges that he or 
his school must advance with Germany. As the unkindest cut 
of all, Mr. Ferrier, who was supported by Hamilton in the com- 
petition for the moral philosophy chair in Edinburgh when 
Professor Wilson retired, and with whom Hamilton (as he 
assured the writer of this article) was long in the habit of con- 
sulting, published the " Institutes of Metaphysic," which is a 
complete revolt against the whole Scottish philosophy ; and 
Kant was not more annoyed with the idealism of Fichte than 
Hamilton was with the " Object plus Subject " of Ferrier. 
There has been an able review of him from the stand-point of 
Hegel by Mr. Sterling. But the most formidable attack was 
made on him in 1865 by John Stuart Mill in his " Examination 
of the Philosophy of Sir William Hamilton." The physiological 
psychologists and materialists of the present day are seeking 
to turn away the attention from him. 

William Hamilton was born in the dingy Professors' Court 
of Glasgow College, March 8, 1791. He was the son of Dr. 
Thomas Hamilton, professor of anatomy and natural history in 
that college, and, it is worthy of being noted, physician to the 
family of Thomas Reid. He was the lineal descendant of Sir 
Robert Hamilton, the not very wise commander of the Cove- 
nanters at Drumclog, and through him, of the Hamiltons of 
Preston, who claim to be descended from the second son of 
the progenitor of the Duke of Hamilton ; and he succeeded in 



Art. lvii.] HIS EDUCATION. 423 

establishing his claim to the title of Sir William Hamilton. 
Having lost his father in early life, he was boarded for some 
time with the Rev. Dr. Summers, the parish minister at Mid 
Calder, and was afterwards sent to a school at Bromley, where 
he was taught classics in the thorough old English style. 
He entered the University of Glasgow in 1803, attended three 
winters, and there studied logic under Jardine, and moral phi- 
losophy under Mylne, standing at the head of his class in both 
departments, by the votes of his fellow-students — the method 
of determining honors at that time when competitive examina- 
tions had not been exalted into so exclusive a place. By 
this time he had become an irregular, but most insatiable 
devourer and also an eager collector of books — in the end his 
library amounted to nearly ten thousand volumes. In 1807 he 
was sent up on the Snell foundation to Oxford, and entered 
Balliol College. Here he took his share in the boating and 
other gymnastic exercises, but entered with far more eagerness 
into the study of Aristotle, the favorite of Oxford at that time. 
" His manner of reading was characteristic. He had his table, 
chairs, and generally his floor strewed with books ; and you 
might find him in the midst of this confusion studying with 
his foot on a chair, poising one great folio on his knee, with 
another in his hand. His mode of ' tearing out the entrails of 
a book,' as he termed it, was remarkable. A perusal of the 
preface, table of contents, and index, and a glance at those 
parts which were new to him, which were few, were all that 
was necessary." The paper which he gave in at his examina- 
tion for the degree was preserved as being singular : — 

" Divinity : Aristotle's Philosophy of Man. 

" Theoretical : De Anima, &c. 

'•Practical — Moral — Ethic: Nic, Mag., Cic. Op. Ph. Domestic: 
CEcon. Civil : De Republ. 

'■ Instrumental : Logic : Organon. Rhetoric : Ars. Rhet., Cic. Op. 
Rhet. Poetic : De Poetica, Pindar, ^Eschylus." 

" He allowed himself to be examined on more than four 
times the number of philosophical and didactic books ever 
wont to be taken up even for the highest honors ; and those, 
likewise, authors far more abstruse than had previously been 
attempted in the schools ; while at the same time he was 
examined in more than any ordinary complement of merely 



424 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. [Art. lvii. 

classical works." In 1812 he went to Edinburgh, and in the 
following year, he became an advocate. He lived in the house 
of his mother, and married an estimable lady, Miss Janet Mar- 
shall, a niece of his mother's. In 1820, when Brown died, he 
became a candidate for his chair, and had the support of 
Dugald Stewart, who was greatly impressed with his learning 
and philosophical ability. He was not particularly successful 
at the bar, and every one rejoiced when, in 182 1, he was 
appointed professor of universal history by the faculty of advo- 
cates, the patrons of the chair. His class was not a large one ; 
but he studied and expounded rare and profound subjects. 
About this time phrenology, as expounded by George Combe, 
was favored by a considerable body of people in Edinburgh ; and 
Hamilton set himself determinedly against it. He conducted 
numerous experiments with his own hands, sawing open skulls, 
dissecting and testing the weight of brains : he is said to 
have weighed one thousand brains belonging to above fifty 
species of animals. In 1827, he published in the " Edinburgh 
Review," his famous article on Cousin and the philosophy of 
the conditioned. This was followed in 1830 by an article on 
perception, and on Reid and Brown ; and in 1833 by an arti- 
cle on Whately and on logic. In 1836 he was appointed 
professor of logic and metaphysics in the University of Edin- 
burgh, in opposition to Isaac Taylor, supported by the religious 
public, and George Combe, supported by the phrenologists. 
He has now a large class of students, numbering from perhaps 
one hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty, and he pre- 
pared for them the courses of lectures in logic and metaphysics, 
which he, or his assistants for him, delivered each successive 
session, till his decease. Having occasion to prelect on Reid, 
his labors led, in 1856, to his edition of Reid's " Collected Works, 
with Notes and Dissertations," which was left unfinished by 
him, but had additions made to it after his death by papers 
which he had written. In 1852 the articles in the " Edinburgh " 
were republished in the " Discussions on Philosophy," with 
large additions on university education, including his vehe- 
ment and senseless diatribe against mathematics. Some years 
before his death he had a stroke of paralysis, which partially 
affected his speech and his power of using his pen, and his 
lectures had to be read in part or in whole by an assistant, 



Art. lvii.] PHILOSOPHIES INFLUENCING HIM. 425 

while his lady acted as his amanuensis. A second attack 
carried him off, after a few days' illness, May 6, 1856. 

Mr. George Moir describes his person : " The massive though 
well-cut features, the firm compressed mouth, and the eagle- 
looking eye, of which the whole pupil was visible, created a 
feeling akin to awe. But in proportion to this apparent stern- 
ness was the charm of his smile and of his whole manner when 
animated." Though a most devoted reader, he never liked 
composition, and commonly wrote under pressure. There 
were stories told in Edinburgh of the nervous agitation into 
which he wrought himself when he had to prepare his lectures 
for his class. His style was always clear and clinching, but 
gives evidence that the writer composed painfully and elabo- 
rately, and was unwilling to waste a single unnecessary word. 
His temper was keen and vehement, but never mean or vindic- 
tive. When he could not carry his purposes, he might break 
off in a passion. He was appointed secretary to the college 
senatus, and there he had a great many projects for elevating 
the university scholarship, and often came into collision with 
his colleagues. 

Of all thinkers Hamilton is the least disposed to call any man 
master ; still there were forces operating upon him and making 
his native tendencies take the particular direction which they 
did. I am convinced that a wholesome tone was given to his 
mind by the philosophy of Reid, the metaphysician of his 
native college, and who died six years after Hamilton was born. 
Had he been trained exclusively in Oxford, he might have 
spent his powers in mere notes and comments on others, and 
we should have been without his profound original observa- 
tions. Had he been reared in Germany, his speculative spirit 
might have wasted itself in a hopelessly entangled dialectic, 
like that of Hegel. To Glasgow and to Reid he owes his dis- 
position to appeal, even in the midst of his most abstract 
disquisitions, to consciousness and to facts. To Oxford we 
may trace his classical scholarship and his love of Aristotle, 
the favorite for long ages with technical Oxonian tutors. We 
only wish that he had been led to drink as deep into Plato as 
he did into Aristotle : it would have widened his sympathies, 
and rubbed off some acute angles of his mind, and made his 
philosophy less cold and negative. A third master mind exer- 



426 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. [Art. lvii. 

cised as great a power over him as either Reid or Aristotle. 
In prosecuting his researches, he was necessarily led beyond 
the narrow scholarship of Britain into the wide field of German 
learning, and while ranging there could not but observe that 
there was a constant reference to the name of Kant. The 
logical power of the author of the " Critic of Pure Reason " 
at once seized his kindred mind, and he eagerly took hold of 
his critical method, and adopted many — I think far too many 
— of his distinctions. Kant exercised as great an influence 
over him as even Reid did. His whole philosophy turns round 
those topics which were discussed in Kant's great work ; and he 
can never get out of those " forms " in which Kant set all our 
ideas so methodically, nor lose sight of those terrible antinomies, 
or contradictions of reason which Kant expounded, in order 
to- show that the laws of pure reason can have no application 
to objects, and which Hegel gloried in and was employing as 
the ground principle of his philosophy. From Kant he got 
the principle that the mind begins with phenomena instead of 
things, and builds thereon by forms or laws of thought ; and it 
was as he pondered on the sphinx enigmas of Kant and Hegel, 
that he evolved his famous axiom about all positive thought 
lying in the proper conditioning of one or other of two contra- 
dictory propositions, one or other of which must, by the rule 
of excluded middle, be void. Fortunately he fell in, at the 
same time, with the less hard and more genial writings of 
Jacobi, who taught him that there was a faith element as well 
as a rational element in the human mind ; but, unfortunately, 
Jacobi thought that faith was opposed to reason, and had no 
distinct views as to the nature of faith, or as to the harmony 
between faith and reason. To this source we may trace those 
appeals which Hamilton is ever making to faith, but without 
specifying what faith is. To his legal studies we may refer 
somewhat of his dry manner and his disputatious spirit. His 
readings in connection with the chair of history enabled him to 
realize the precise condition of the ages in which the opinions 
of philosophers were given forth. The catholic views which 
his extensive reading led him to adopt set him in determined 
opposition to the miserably narrow sensational school of 
France, and to Professor Mylne, of Glasgow, and Dr. Thomas 
Brown, who had given way too much to that school. The lofty 



Art. lvii.] COUSIN AND HAMILTON. 427 

spiritual views which he had caught from Reid and Kant set 
him against materialism ; and his medical studies, to which his 
father's profession may have directed him, enabled him to meet 
phrenology, and to give an admirable account of the physiology 
of the senses. Such was the course of training which he had 
gone through when he was asked to write a review of Cousin, 
and found himself face to face with the philosophy of the 
absolute. 

In contemplating these two eminent philosophers, — Ham- 
ilton and Cousin, — then brought into collision, it is difficult 
to say whether one is most struck with their resemblances 
or their differences. They are alike in respect of the ful- 
ness and the general accuracy of their scholarship. Both 
are alike distinguished for their historical knowledge and 
critical power. Even here, however, we may observe a con- 
trast, — Cousin being the more universal in his sympathies, 
and Hamilton being the more discriminating and the more 
minutely accurate in his acquaintance with rare and obscure 
authors. Both, perhaps, might have had some of their views 
expanded, if, along with their scholarship, they had entered 
more thoroughly into the inductive spirit of modern physi- 
cal researches. But the age of universal knowledge is past, 
and it is vain to expect that any human capacity will contain 
all learning. Both are original, vigorous, and independent 
thinkers ; and both are distinguished by a catholic spirit in 
philosophy : but the one is more Platonic, and the other more 
Aristotelian, in his tastes and habits. The one delights to 
show wherein he agrees with all others, the other is more ad- 
dicted to show wherein he differs from all others. Both are 
clear writers : but the one is distinguished by the eloquence of 
his composition and the felicity of his illustrations ; the other, 
by the accuracy and expressiveness of his, at times, harsh 
nomenclature. Cousin is, undoubtedly, the man of finest 
genius and most refined taste ; the other appears to me to 
have been the man of coolest and most penetrating intellect. 
The one makes every subject of which he treats irridescent by 
the play of his fancy ; the other bands it into a structure of 
great solidity by the rigidity of his logic. Both were admirers 
of the German as well as the Scottish schools of philosophy ; 
but Cousin's predilections were at one time more towards the 



428 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. [Art. lvii. 

former, and of a later date he became more attached to the 
latter ; whereas Hamilton started more in the Scottish spirit, 
and swung latterly towards the German method. The two 
came into collision when the Scotchman reviewed the French- 
man in the " Edinburgh Review." But when Hamilton became 
a candidate for the chair of moral philosophy in Edinburgh he 
received powerful and generous aid from his rival ; and when 
Hamilton published his edition of Reid, he dedicated it to M. 
Victor Cousin. 

The writer of this article has a very vivid recollection of Sir 
William in happening to pass into his class-room a year or 
two after his appointment. There was an evident manliness 
in his person and his whole manner and address. His features 
were marked, he had an eye of a very deep lustre, and his 
expression was eminently intellectual. He read his lecture in 
a clear, emphatic manner, without show, pretension, or affecta- 
tion of any kind. His nomenclature sounded harsh and uncouth 
to one unacquainted with it, but his enunciations were all per- 
spicuous and explicit. The class was a large one, numbering 
I should suppose 150. At the opening there was a furious 
scribbling, visible and audible, by all the students in their note- 
books ; but I observed that, as the lecture proceeded, one 
after another was left behind, and, when it was half through, at 
least one-third had ceased to take notes, and had evidently 
lost their interest in, or comprehension of, the subject. Unfor- 
tunately for the Scottish colleges, unfortunately for the youth 
attending them, students enter the logic class in the second 
year of their course, when the majority are not ripe for it. A 
course of lectures, like that given by Jardine of Glasgow, 
might be fit for such a class, but not a rigid course like 
that of Hamilton, who did, indeed, make his thoughts as clear 
as such profound thoughts could be made, but could not bring 
them down to the comprehension of a promiscuous class, 
of which many are under seventeen, and some under sixteen, 
or even fifteen years of age. But even among second year 
students there were every year a larger or less number who 
rejoiced to find that he first awakened independent thought 
within them, and who were ready to acknowledge ever after- 
wards that they owed more to him than to any other professor, 
or to all the other professors under whom they studied. 



Art. lvii.] HIS METAPHYSICS. 4^9 

In his examinations he expected a sort of recitation of his 
lectures from the students. He also encouraged his pupils to 
submit to voluntary examinations on private studies undertaken 
by them. He prescribed essays on subjects lectured on, and 
in these essays he allowed great latitude in the expression of 
opinions, and some of his students, out of a spirit of indepen- 
dence or contradiction, would at times take up the defence of 
Dr. Brown, and were not discouraged. All students of high 
intellectual power, and especially those of a metaphysical taste, 
received a stimulus of a very lofty kind from his lectures, and 
these examinations and essays. I suspect that some of the 
duller and idler passed through the class without getting much 
benefit. In his whole intercourse with young men there was 
great courtesy and kindness, and a readiness to appreciate 
talent and independent thinking wherever he found it. For a 
number of years before his death, Sir William was oppressed 
with infirmities, and had to employ an assistant ; and it was 
characteristic of him that he was in the habit of selecting for 
the office some one of those who had been his more distin- 
guished students. We may now look at his metaphysics and 
his logic. 

Metaphysics. The first of the volumes is on philosophy 
generally and on mental philosophy in particular. He begins 
by recommending the study, gives the definitions, unfolds the 
divisions, explains the terms with amazing erudition and unsur- 
passed logical precision, and dwells largely on consciousness, 
its laws and conditions. The reading of this volume will prove 
as bracing to the mind as a run up a hill of a morning on a 
botanical or geological excursion is to the body. We especially 
recommend the study of it to those whose pursuits are usually 
of a different character, as, for example, to those who are dissi- 
pating their minds by light literature, or whose attention has 
been directed exclusively to physical facts, and who have thus 
been cultivating one set of the faculties which God has given 
them, to the neglect of others, and have thus been putting their 
mental frame out of proper shape and proportion, — as the 
fisher, by strengthening his chest and arms in rowing, leaves 
his lower extremities thin and slender. There is a fine healthy 
tone about his defence of the liberal as against the more lucra- 
tive sciences, which latter Schelling called Brodwissenchafteii, 



430 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. [Art. lvii. 

which Hamilton wittily translates, the bread and butter sciences. 
He quotes with approbation the well-known sentiment of Les- 
sing, " Did the Almighty, holding in his right hand Truth, and 
in his left Search after Truth, deign to tender me the one 
I might prefer, — in all humility, but without hesitation, I 
would request Search after Truth." But we should concur in 
such statements as these only with two important explanations 
or qualifications ; the one is, that the search be after truth, 
which we must value when we find it ; and the other is, that it 
be after attainable and useful truth. It has been the great 
error and sin of speculative philosophy that it has been expend- 
ing its strength in building in one age ingenious theories 
which the next age takes down. I maintain that such activity 
wastes the energy without increasing the strength. He who 
thus fights is like one beating the air, and his exertion ends, 
not in satisfaction, but in weariness and restlessness. The 
admirable test of Bacon here comes in to restrain all such use- 
less speculation, viz., that we are to try them by their fruits. 
Had this been the proper place we could have shown that 
Bacon's doctrine on this subject has often been misunderstood. 
He does not say that science is to be valued for its fruits, but it 
is to be tested by its fruits ; just as faith, which, however, is of 
value in itself, is to be tried by the good works to which it 
leads. Thus limited and thus understood, there is profound 
wisdom in the caution of Bacon, which will not discourage an 
inductive inquiry into the human mind, its laws and funda- 
mental principles, but will lay a restraint on the profitless meta- 
physical theories which have run to seed prematurely in 
Germany, where thinkers are sick of them, and are now being 
blown into our country and scattered over it like the down of 
thistles. 

This volume is full of brief and sententious maxims. Take 
the following as examples : — 

" It is ever the contest that pleases us, and not the victory. Thus it is in 
play; thus it is in hunting; thus it is in the search after truth ; thus it is in 
life. The past does not interest, the present does not satisfy, the future 
alone is the object which engages us." " What man holds of matter does 
not make up his personality. They are his, not he ; man is not an organ- 
ism, — he is an intelligence served by organs." " I do not mean to assert 
that all materialists deny or actually disbelieve a God. For in very many 
cases this would be at once an unmerited compliment to their reasoning, 



Art. lvii.] DISTRIBUTION OF FACULTIES. 43 1 

and an unmerited reproach to their faith." "Wonder has been contemp- 
tuously called the daughter of ignorance ; true, but wonder we should add 
is the mother of knowledge." " Woe to the revolutionist who is not him- 
self a creature of the revolution ! If he anticipate he is lost, for it requires 
what no individual can supply, a long and powerful counter-sympathy in a 
nation to untwine the ties of custom which bind a people to the established 
and the old." 

The following is his tabular view of the distribution of phi- 
losophy : — 



Mind 

or 
Con- 
scious- 
ness. 



Facts, — Phenomenology, 



Cognitions. 

Em pi rical Psychology, \ gnarif e" Powers (Will and Desire). 

(Cognitions, — Logic. 
Feelings, — Aesthetic. 
Cona.ive Powers, jSS*t, 

Results, — Ontology, Inferen- I Being of God. 
tial Psychology, \ Immortality of the Soul, &c. 



I set little value on this division. The same topics would 
require to be discussed under more than one head. In his 
lectures Sir William has taken up only one of the three grand 
general groups, viz., Empirical Psychology, and even this he 
has discussed only in part. A portion of the second group 
is treated of in his lectures on logic. On the others he never 
entered. 

It will be seen from the above table that he followed Kant in 
giving a threefold distribution of the mental faculties into the 
Cognitive, the Emotive, and the Conative. This is an improve- 
ment on the old division by Aristotle into the cognitive 
and motive, or of that of the schoolmen into the under- 
standing and the will. Still it is not complete and exhaust- 
ive. He is obliged to include the imagination in the first 
head, and yet it can scarcely be called a cognitive power, 
though, of course, it implies a previous cognition. The con- 
science comes in under the conative powers ; but, in fact, 
the conscience partakes of the nature both of a cognitive and 
conative power. It is one of the defects of the arrangement 
that it does not allot a clearly separate place to the conscience. 

The following is his division of the cognitive powers : — 

T Presenta'ive 1 Extemal= Perception. 

l. rresentaxie, j Internal = Self-Consciousness. 

II. Conservative, = Memory 

TTT -r, , • I Without Will = Suggestion. 

III. Reproductive, = J with. Will = Reminiscence. 

IV. Representative. = Imagination. 

V. Elaborative, = Comparison, — Faculty of Relations. 
VI. Regulative, = Reason, — Common Sense. 



432 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. [Art. lvii. 

The account of the cognitive powers in the first 332 pages of 
the second volume, down to the regulative powers, not included, 
will be regarded in the end, if I do not mistake, as the most 
valuable part of Sir William Hamilton's metaphysics. His 
pupils will probably fix on the very part I have designedly 
excepted, viz., the regulative faculties, as being the most im- 
portant. Farther on in this article I mean to show that he 
has greatly misapprehended the nature of these regulative 
powers. Meanwhile let us look at the account which he has 
given of the other mental faculties. 

1. Like the Scotch metaphysicians he paid great attention 
to the Senses. His views were first given to the world in his 
article in the " Edinburgh Review," republished in the Discus- 
sions, and have been expanded in his notes on Reid and in his 
class lectures. He has a famous arrangement of the various 
forms which have been taken by the ideal theory of sense- 
perception. Realists are either natural, who maintain that we 
know the external thing directly ; or hypothetical (cosmothetic 
idealists), who suppose that there is a real world not directly 
known. Idealists are absolute or., presentative, who suppose 
that there is only the idea ; or cosmothetic or representative 
(hypothetical realists) who hold that we know the external 
thing by a representation. The possible forms of the repre- 
sentative hypothesis are three : (1.) The representative object 
not a modification of mind, but an extra-mental object, physical 
or hyperphysical ; (2.) The representative object a modifica- 
tion of mind, dependent for its apprehension, but not for its 
existence, on an act of consciousness, say an idea in the mind, 
as was held apparently by Locke ; (3.) The representative 
object a modification of mind, non-existent out of conscious- 
ness, the idea and its perception only different relations of an 
act (state) really identical ; the view taken by Arnauld and 
Brown. The distinctions thus drawn are of great importance, 
and should be kept steadily in view in judging of theories. 
But his divisions do not embrace all cases. Dr. Brown does 
not hold by the ideal, but the causal or inferential, theory ; and 
Hamilton has missed the mark in his criticism of him. 

I am inclined to agree with him that our original perceptions 
are probably of our organism, or of objects in immediate con- 
tact with it. This doctrine seems to have been expounded 



Art. lvii.] ON SENSE-PERCEPTION. 433 

simultaneously by Hamilton ; by Saisset, the French meta- 
physician ; and by John Miiller, the physiologist On one 
small point I would differ from Hamilton. Our original per- 
ceptions through the eye do not seem to me to be points of 
light, but of a colored surface affecting our organism, but at 
what distance we cannot say till experience comes to our aid. 
But the doctrine identified with his name is that of immediate 
perception. He intended to take the same view as Reid did, 
and, when he began to edit Reid's works, he thought that their 
opinions were the same. But, as he advances, he sees that they 
differ ; and he ends by doubting whether Reid was after all a 
realist. Reid's doctrine is, that there is first an organic affec- 
tion ; then a sensation in the mind ; and, thirdly, a perception 
suggested by an unreasoning and instinctive process. Hamil- 
ton's doctrine is, that, following the organic affection, there is 
simultaneously a sensation and perception, the one being strong 
as the other is weak, and vice versa; that is, when the sensa- 
tion is lively the perception is faint, and when the perception is 
prominent the impression is feeble. Both, however, agree in 
the main point, that the process is intuitive and that there is 
no reasoning involved. Hamilton's doctrine is specially that 
of immediate perception ; that is, of perception without a 
medium. 

It is objected to Hamilton's theory, that he overlooks the 
numerous intermediate processes revealed by physiology. In 
vision there are the rays of light ; the reflection and refrac- 
tion of them, the picture on the retina, an action along the 
optic nerve to the seat of sensation, an action thence we know not 
how to the brain, an action in the cells which constitute the 
gray matter surrounding the brain, and then, or perhaps not 
even then, but only after some farther steps, the perception of 
the object, say a tree, from which the rays of light come. How 
it is asked can perception be immediate, when all these media 
are evidently implied ? To this the followers of Hamilton might 
reply, that he never thought of disputing the existence of steps 
between the external object and the percipient mind, which, 
when it comes into exercise, contemplates the tree, and not an 
image or representation of it in the mind, in the body or out of 
the body. But the objection may now take a somewhat different 
form. It may be urged that, after all, we do not see the tree, 

28 



434 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. [Art. lvii. 

and it will be asked, What do we perceive intuitively ? Cer- 
tainly not the brain cells, or the influence transmitted to them, 
or the action of the sensorium, or even the image on the retina, 
or the coats and humors of the eye, or the vibrations that con- 
stitute the light. What, then, do we perceive ? Hamilton 
allowed that it was not the distant tree ; for he adopted the 
Berkleian theory of vision, and held that we are immediately 
percipient of distance by the eye. What, then, do we see imme- 
diately ? Hamilton was helped here by another doctrine of his, 
that the mind may be said to be indiscriminately in the brain 
and in the whole nervous apparatus, so long as it keeps up its 
connection with the centre ; and by the further doctrine that 
our primary perceptions are of our bodily frame and of objects 
in contact with it. In taste, smell, and hearing, we perceive 
the palate, nostrils, ear ; in feeling, our extended frame ; and by 
the muscular sense an extra-organic object resisting our energy. 
The proper account is, that in sense-perception, when formed, 
we perceive our frame as affected or objects affecting the 
frame. I am ready to allow as many processes as the physi- 
ologist can prove to exist in the nervous system and brain 
prior to perception. But I hold that perception is a mental 
and not a bodily act. We hold further that nervous action, and 
brain action and cellular, do not constitute perception, which is 
knowledge. I assert that, while there may be bodily ante- 
cedents, they are not properly the causes of perception or any 
proper mental act, such as the perception of beauty or of moral 
excellence. I may add that I have no objections to find them 
represented as the occasions or conditions of sense-perception, 
not therefore of our higher mental acts. If we hold, as I hold, 
that in creature action all causes are concauses, that is com- 
posed of more than one agent, then the brain action may be an 
agent, a necessary but inferior agent, in producing perception, — 
the main agency being a capacity of the mind. I am inclined 
to go a step further, and to allow that the defenders of natural 
realism might admit for the sake of argument, and admit out 
and out if proven, that there is a process of reasoning in every 
perceptive operation, even in such an operation as perceiving 
snow as a colored surface — just as all admit that there is infer- 
ence when we place that snow on a mountain top at a distance. 
But still they will insist that when mind perceives matter, it 



Art. lvii.] ON CONSCIOUSNESS. 435 

perceives it as out of itself, and as extended ; that it cannot 
infer this from a nervous action, or from an unextended 
sensation or impression within the mind ; and that the percep- 
tion of an external, extended object, be it in the body or beyond 
the body, must be immediate, intuitive, and original. 

2. Sir William Hamilton has been much lauded for the view 
which he has given of Consciousness. In this I cannot con- 
cur. He avows that he uses consciousness in two distinct 
senses or applications. First, he has a general consciousness 
treated of largely in the first volume. This he tells us cannot 
be defined. (Vol. I. p. 158.) " But it comprehends all the modi- 
fications, — all the phenomena of the thinking subject." (p. 
183.) " Knowledge and belief are both contained under con- 
sciousness." (p. 191.) Again, "consciousness is co-extensive 
with our cognitive faculties." " Our special faculties of knowl- 
edge are only modifications of consciousness." (p. 207.) He 
shows that consciousness implies discrimination, judgment, and 
memory, (p. 202-206.) This is wide enough : still he imposes a 
limit ; for consciousness " is an immediate not a mediate knowl- 
edge." (p. 202.) Already, as it seems to me, inconsistencies are 
beginning to creep in ; for he had told us first that conscious- 
ness includes "all the phenomena of the thinking subject;" 
now he so limits it as to exclude " mediate knowledge," which 
is surely a modification of the thinking subject. Conscious- 
ness is represented as including belief ; and yet it must exclude 
all those beliefs in which the object is not immediately before 
us. He stoutly maintains what no one will deny, that this gen- 
eral consciousness is not a special faculty ; but when he comes 
to draw out a list of faculties in the second volume, he includes 
among them a special faculty, which he calls consciousness, but 
to which, for distinction's sake, he prefixes self, and designates 
it self-consciousness. It is the office of this special faculty to 
" afford us a knowledge of the phenomena of our minds." (Vol. 
II. p. 192.) He justifies himself in drawing a distinction be- 
tween sense-perception and self-consciousness on the ground 
that, " though the immediate knowledge of matter and of mind 
are still only modifications of consciousness, yet that their dis- 
crimination as subaltern faculties is both allowable and conven- 
ient." 

Such is the doctrine and such the nomenclature of Hamilton 



436 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. [Art. lvii. 

on this subject. I confess that I have great doubts of the 
propriety of applying the phrase " consciousness," both in this 
general and specific way. In the first sense "consciousness 
constitutes, or is co-extensive with all our faculties of knowl- 
edge," and he speaks of our being endowed with a faculty of 
cognition or consciousness, in general (Vol. II. p. 10), and says 
that " consciousness may be regarded as the general faculty of 
knowledge." Now it is certainly desirable to have a word to 
denote our faculties of knowledge, or of immediate knowledge ; 
but why not call them knowing powers, or cognitive powers, 
and their exercise or energy, knowledge or cognition, and then 
the word " consciousness " would be reserved unambiguously for 
the cognizance which the mind takes of self in its particular 
states. The word (from con scio to know together with) seems 
the appropriate one to denote that knowledge of self which co- 
exists with all our other knowledge of things material or things 
spiritual ; and indeed with all our other mental exercises, such 
as feelings and volitions. It is certainly in this sense that the 
term is employed by Hutcheson, by Reid, by Stewart, by Royer- 
Collard ; and all Hamilton's vehement criticisms of these men 
are inapplicable and powerless, for this very obvious reason, that 
they use the word consciousness as he uses self-consciousness, 
acknowledged by him to be a special faculty. It is an inevita- 
ble result of using the phrases in two senses, a wider and a 
straiter, that we are ever in danger of passing inadvertently 
from the one meaning to the other, and making affirmations in 
the one sense which are true only in the other. I rather 
think that Hamilton himself has not escaped this error, and 
the confusion thence arising. He is ever appealing to consci- 
ousness, as Locke did to idea, and Brown did to suggestion ; 
but we are not always sure in which of the senses, whether in 
both, or in one, or in which one. He is ever ascribing powers 
to consciousness, which he would have explained, or modified, 
or limited, if the distinction had been kept steadily in view. 
Thus he is often announcing that consciousness is the uni- 
versal condition of intelligence ; if this is meant of the general 
consciousness, it can mean no more than this, that man must 
have knowing powers in order to know ; if meant of the special 
consciousness, it is not true ; it is rather true that there must 
be some mental exercise as a condition of the knowledge of 



Aet. lvii.] CONSERVATIVE POWERS. 437 

self. He calls the principles of common sense the facts of con- 
sciousness, emphatically ; whereas these principles, as principles, 
are not before the consciousness as principles at all. The indi- 
vidual manifestations are of course before the consciousness 
(though not more so than any other mental exercise), but not 
the principles themselves, which are derived from the individ- 
ual exercises, by a reflex process of abstraction and generaliza- 
tion. He speaks everywhere as if we must ever be conscious 
at one and the same time of subject and object, — meaning 
external object ; whereas we may be conscious of the subject- 
mind thinking about some state of self present or absent. His 
quondam friend, Professor Ferrier, carried the doctrine a step 
farther, and maintained that a knowledge of self is a condition 
of all knowledge of not self, whereas it is merely a fact that 
the one co-exists with the other in one concrete act, in which 
we know not self to be different from self, and independent of 
self. 

3. The Conservative, Reproductive, and Representative facul- 
ties might all have been included, I think, under one head, 
with subdivisions. The account which he gives of this group 
is upon the whole the best which we have in our language. 
Still there are oversights in it. Thus, in order to make the 
analysis complete, I should have had the recognitive power, 
or that which recognizes the object recalled as having been 
before the mind in time past. Had he given this power a sep- 
arate place, he would have seen more clearly than he does how 
the idea of time arises. Along with the mere representative 
power he should have mentioned the compounding or grouping 
power of imagination, which combines the scattered images 
into one new whole. He refers at times to man's native power 
of using signs ; why not specify a symbolic power, enabling 
man to think by signs standing for notions. 

In explaining the nature of the conservative or retentive 
faculty, and elsewhere, he has unfolded some peculiar views 
which I consider to be as correct as they are profound, but 
he carries them to a length which I am not prepared to 
allow. What is the state of an idea when not falling at the 
time under consciousness ? This is a question which has often 
been put. Thus having seen the Crystal Palace of 185 1, the 
question is put, — what place has that idea in my mind, when 



438 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. [Art. lvii. 

I am not precisely thinking about the object ? Is it dead or 
simply dormant ? We must of course answer that the idea can 
have no existence as an idea, when not before the conscious- 
ness. Still it must have some sort of existence. There 
exists in the mind a power to reproduce it according to the 
laws of association. The writer of this article having had 
occasion, years ago, to pass over the plains of Lombardy, is 
not therefore always imaging them, but he has the power of 
recalling them, and finds that they are recalled every time he 
hears of the jealousies between Austria and Italy. It is a 
great truth that the mind is ever acquiring potency, is ever 
laying up power. We have something analogous in the 
physical world. Thus a power coming from the sun in the 
geological age of the coal-measures was laid up in the plant, 
went down into the strata of the ground, and comes up 
now in our coals ready to supply us with comfortable heat 
in our rooms, and with tremendous mechanical force for our 
steam-engines. This is the doctrine of all the physicists of 
our day. But there is a similar laying up of power in the 
mind, of intellectual, and we may add, of moral or immoral 
power. Aristotle had certainly a glimpse of some such doc- 
trine, and spoke of a dimamis, an entelecheia, and an ener- 
geia ; the first denoting the original capacity, the second the 
capacity in complete readiness to act, and the third the capacity 
in act or operation. Modern mechanical science is enunciating 
this doctrine in a more definite form, and distinguishing be- 
tween capacity and potential energy and actual energy. Sir 
William Hamilton, taking the hint from Aristotle, has adopted 
the views of the German Schmid (who again had certain specu- 
lations of Leibnitz before him), who declares that the energy 
of mind which has once been cannot readily be conceived as 
abolished, and that " the problem most difficult of solution is 
not how a mental activity endures, but how it ever vanishes." 
(Vol. II. p. 212.) 

So far I can concur ; but when he maintains that there are 
in the mind, acts, energies, and operations, of which it is not 
conscious, I hesitate and draw back. His doctrine on this 
subject is founded on the views of Leibnitz, as to there being 
perceptions below consciousness. The class of facts on which 
he rests his opinion seem to me to be misapprehended. 



Art. lvii.] UNCONSCIOUS MENTAL OPERATIONS. 439 

" When we hear the distant murmur of the sea, what are the 
constituents of this total perception of which we are con- 
scious ? " He answers that the murmur is a sum made up of 
parts, and that if the noise of each wave made no impression 
on our sense, the noise of the sea as the result of these impres- 
sions could not be realized. " But the noise of each several 
wave at the distance, we suppose, is inaudible ; we must, how- 
ever, admit that they produce a certain modification beyond 
consciousness, on the percipient object." (Vol. I. p. 351.) He 
speaks of our perception of a forest as made up of impressions 
left by each leaf, which impressions are below consciousness. 
There is an entire misinterpretation of the facts in these state- 
ments, and this according to Hamilton's own theory of the 
object intuitively perceived. The mind is not immediately 
cognizant of the sound of the sea or of its several waves ; nor 
of the trees of the forest and their several leaves. All that it 
knows intuitively is an affection of the organism as affected by 
the sound or sight. The impression made by the distant ob- 
ject is on the organism, and when the impression is sufficiently 
strong on the organism, the mind is called into exercise, and 
from the organic affections argues or infers the external and dis- 
tant cause. Thus there is no proof of a mental operation of 
which we are unconscious. 

He explains by these supposed unconscious acts a class of 
mental phenomena with which every one who has ever reflected 
on the operations of his own mind is familiar. The merchant 
walks in a brown study from his house to his place of business ; 
there must have been many mental acts performed on the way, 
but they are now all gone. The question is, were they ever 
before the consciousness ? Hamilton maintains that they never 
were ; Dugald Stewart maintains that they were for the time, 
but that the mind cannot recall them. Notwithstanding all 
the acute remarks of Hamilton, I adhere to the theory of 
Stewart. I do so on the general principle that in devising a 
theory to explain a set of phenomena we should never call in 
a class of facts, of whose existence we have no other proof, 
when we can account for the whole by an order of facts known 
to exist on independent evidence. Hamilton says : " When 
suddenly awakened during sleep (and to ascertain the fact I 
have caused myself to be roused at different seasons of the 



440 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. [Art. lvii. 

night), I have always been able to observe that I was in the 
middle of a dream ; " but adds, " that he was often scarcely 
certain of more than the fact that he was not awakened from 
an unconscious state, and that we are often not able to recollect 
our dreams." He gives, as the peculiarity of somnambulism, 
that we have no recollection when we awake of what has 
occurred during its continuance. (Vol. I. p. 320-322.) Every 
one will admit that we are often conscious of states at the time, 
which we either cannot remember at all, or (what will equally 
serve our purpose) more probably cannot remember, except for 
a very brief period after we have experienced them. We have 
thus an established order of facts competent to explain the 
whole phenomenon without resorting to a Leibnitzian doctrine, 
which has been applied by certain later German pantheists to 
show how existence may rise gradually from deadness to life, 
and from unconsciousness to consciousness. 

Under the head of the reproductive faculties he has two 
profound lectures on the Association of Ideas. In the close 
of his edition of Reid there is a learned disquisition on the 
well-known passage of Aristotle, in which he gives, with his 
usual brevity, a classification of laws which regulate the train 
of our thoughts. Hamilton so interprets that passage as to 
make Aristotle announce one generic law and three special 
ones. I am unwilling to set my authority against so accu- 
rate a scholar as Hamilton ; but I have often looked into that 
passage, and can find no evidence of Aristotle having resolved 
all into one law. In the same note Hamilton had begun to 
expound his own theory, but broke off, and closed the book in 
the middle of a sentence. Most readers will feel that the 
account given in these lectures, though somewhat fuller, is far 
too brief, and illustrated by too few examples to be easily un- 
derstood. His pupils could not be more profitably employed 
than in fully unfolding the doctrine of their master on this 
subject, and applying it to explain the well-known phenomena. 
He thinks that the whole facts can be explained by one great 
law, which he calls the law of redintegration, which he finds 
incidentally expressed by Augustine. This law may be thus 
enounced, — " Those thoughts suggest each other which had 
previously constituted parts of the same entire or total act of 
(Vol. II. p. 238.) He again quotes Schmid : " Thus 



Art. lvii.] ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 44 1 

the supreme law of association, — that activities excite each 
other in proportion as they have previously belonged as parts 
to one whole activity, — is explained from the still more uni- 
versal principle of the unity of all our mental energies in gen- 
eral." (p. 241.) I am inclined to look on this as, on the whole, 
the most philosophical account which has been given of the 
law of association. It at once explains the cases of simple 
repetition in which one link of a chain of ideas which had pre- 
viously passed through the mind, being caught, all the rest 
come after ; as when we have got the first line of a poem 
committed to memory, and the others follow in order. It 
easily explains, too, all cases in which we have had a variety of 
objects before us in one concrete act, — thus if we have passed 
along a particular road, with a certain person, observing the 
mountain or river in front, and talking on certain objects, — we 
find that when any one of these recurs it is apt to suggest the 
others. It is thus if we have often heard in youth the cry of a 
particular animal, goose or grouse, turkey or curlew, the cry 
will ever bring up afresh the scenes of our childhood. It is 
more doubtful whether the law can explain a third class of 
cases when it is not the same which suggests the same, but an 
object suggests another object which has never been individ- 
ually associated with it, but is like it, or is otherwise correlated 
with it ; as when the conqueror Alexander suggests Julius 
Caesar or Bonaparte. It needs an explanation to show how 
the law can cover such a case, which, however, I rather think 
it can, though I am by no means inclined to admit the expla- 
nations of the Hamiltonians proceeding on their narrow and 
peculiar view of correlates. 

4. This leads us to refer to the next faculty, — the Elabora- 
tive, equal to Comparison, — that is the Faculty of Relations. 
The phrase elaborative is an expressive epithet, but is not 
a good special denomination, as there is elaboration in other 
exercises as well as in this. Comparison, or the correlative 
faculties, or the faculties of relation, is the better epithet. 
Under this head he has some learned and acute remarks on the 
abstract and the general notion, and on language, and is terri- 
bly severe, as usual, on Dr. Thomas Brown. I am of opinion 
that Brown's views on this subject are, in one or two points, 
more enlarged than those of Hamilton himself, who has over- 



442 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. [Art. lvii. 

looked essential elements. " In so far," he says, " as two objects 
resemble each other, the notion we have of them is identical, 
and, therefore, to us, the objects may be considered as the 
same." (Vol. II. pp. 294.) I cannot give my adherence to 
this doctrine of the identity of resembling objects. Altogether 
his account of the relations which the mind can discover is 
narrow and exclusive. He specifies first the judgment virtually 
pronounced in an act of perception of the non-ego, or an act 
of self-consciousness of the ego ; then secondly the something 
of which we are conscious and of which the predicate existence 
is twofold, the ego and the non-ego ; thirdly, the recognition 
of the multiplicity of the co-existent or successive phenomena, 
and the judgment in regard to their resemblance or dissimilar- 
ity ; fourthly, the comparison of the phenomena with the 
native notion of substance ; fifthly, the collection of succes- 
sive phenomena under the native notion of causation. He 
might have seen a much broader and more comprehensive ac- 
count of the relations which the mind can perceive in Locke's 
"Essay" (B. II. c. 28); in Hume's "Treatise on Human Nature" 
(B. I. p. i. § 5) ; or in Brown's Lectures (Lect. xlv.) I am sur- 
prised he has never made a reference to such relations — on 
which the mind so often dwells — as those of space, time, 
quantity, properties of objects, cause and effect, and moral 
good. 

5. We have now only to consider, and in doing so have to 
discuss, the Regulative Faculties of the mind. I like the phrase 
regulative, only we must dissociate it from the peculiar sense in 
which it is used by Kant (from whom Hamilton has borrowed 
it), who supposes that the mind in judging of objects imposes 
on them a relation not in the objects themselves. The epithet 
expresses that such principles as substance and quality, cause 
and effect, are " the laws by which the mind is governed in 
its operations" (Vol. II., p. 15), which laws I may add — but 
Hamilton would not — are not before the consciousness as 
principles when we exercise them. In calling them faculties, 
he acknowledges that he uses the word in a peculiar significa- 
tion, (p. 347.) The truth is Hamilton does not see the rela- 
tion in which they stand to the faculties : they are not separate 
faculties, but are involved in all the faculties, being, in fact, 
the necessary laws which spontaneously and unconsciously 



Art. lvii.] REGULATIVE FACULTIES. 443 

guide their exercise. His treatment of this subject in a more 
elaborate manner, in the " Conditions of the Thinkable Sys- 
tematized, or the Alphabet of Human Thought," appended to 
the Discussions, and in a somewhat more popular manner in his 
Lectures, was probably regarded by himself, and is certainly 
regarded by his admiring pupils, as the most important contri- 
bution made by him to philosophy. On the other hand, I look 
on the system as being, on the whole, a failure. He has 
labored to combine the philosophies of Reid and Kant ; but we 
see everywhere the chinks at the line of junction. The principles 
of common sense looking at objective truth, will not join on to 
the empty forms which imply and guarantee no reality. In 
the construction of his philosophy of the relative or conditioned, 
as he calls it, he has expended an immense amount of logical 
ability ; but he has lost himself in Kantian distinctions, giving 
in to Kant's theory as to space and time, making them, and 
also cause and effect, merely subjective laws of thought and 
not of things ; and the system which he has reared is an arti- 
ficial one, in which the flaws and oversights and rents are 
quite as evident as the great skill which he has shown in its 
erection. I dispute three of his fundamental and favorite 
positions. 

(i.) I dispute his theory of relativity. I acknowledge that 
there is a sense in which human knowledge is relative. There 
is a sense in which all thinkers, except those of the extravagant 
schools of Schelling and Hegel, hold a doctrine of relativity ; 
but this is not the same as that elaborated by Hamilton : 
" From what has been said you will be able to understand 
what is meant by the proposition that all our knowledge is 
only relative. It is relative, — first, because existence is not 
cognizable absolutely and in itself, but only in special modes ; 
second, because these modes can be known only if they stand in 
a certain relation to our faculties ; and, thirdly, because the 
modes thus relative to our faculties are presented to, and known 
by, the mind only under modifications determined by these 
faculties themselves." (Vol. I., p. 148.) 

In these three general propositions, and in the several 
clauses, there are an immense number and variety of assertions 
wrapped up : to some I assent, from others I as decidedly 
dissent. I acknowledge, first, that things are known to us 



444 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. [Art. lvii. 

only so far as we have the capacity to know them ; in this 
sense, indeed, even the divine knowledge is relative. I 
acknowledge, secondly, that we do not know all things ; 
nay, that we do not know all about any one thing. Herein 
human knowledge differs from the divine : but the word 
relative is not the phrase to attach to human knowledge ; in 
order to point out the difference, it would be better to say that 
man's knowledge is partial or finite as distinguished from per- 
fect or absolute. I may admit, thirdly, that man discovers 
external objects under a relation to himself and his cognitive 
mind. So much, then, I freely allow. But, on the ether 
hand, I demur, first, to the statement that we do not know 
existence in itself, or, as he expresses it elsewhere in Kantian 
phraseology, that we do not know the thing in itself (Ding an 
sich). I do not like the language : it is ambiguous. I 
doubt whether there be such a thing as " existence in itself ; " 
and, of course, what does not exist cannot be known. If he 
mean to assert that we do not know things as existing, I 
deny the statement. Every thing we know, we know as exist- 
ing ; not only so, but we know the thing itself, — not all about 
the thing, but so much of the very thing itself. Then I demur 
secondly, to the statement, which is thoroughly Kantian, 
that the mind in cognition adds elements of its own : as he 
expresses it elsewhere, " Suppose that the total object of 
consciousness in perception = 12 ; and suppose that the ex- 
ternal reality contributes 6, the material sense 3, and the mind 
3 ; this may enable you to form some rude conjecture of the 
nature of the object of perception." (Vol. II., p. 129.) I allow 
that sensations, feelings, impressions associate themselves 
with our knowledge : but every man of sound sense knows 
how to distinguish between them , and it is surely the busi- 
ness of the philosopher not to confound them, but to point 
out the essential difference. To suppose that in perception, or 
cognition proper, the mind adds any thing, is a doctrine fraught 
with perilous consequences ; for, if it adds one thing, why not 
two things, or ten things, or all things, till we are landed in 
absolute idealism, or, what is nearly allied to it, in absolute 
scepticism ? 

The defective nature of the whole Hamiltonian philosophy 
comes out in its results. Comparing his philosophy with that 



Art. lvii.] DOCTRINE OF RELATIVITY. 445 

of Germany he says : " Extremes meet. In one respect both 
coincide, for both agree that the knowledge of nothing is 
the principle or the consummation of all true philosophy, 
' Scire nihil, — stzidinm quo nos Icetamur utrique! But the 
one doctrine openly maintaining that the nothing must yield 
every thing, is a philosophic omniscience, whereas the other 
holding, that nothing can yield nothing, is a philosophic nes- 
cience. In other words : the doctrine of the unconditioned is 
a philosophy confessing relative ignorance, but professing ab- 
solute knowledge ; while the doctrine of the conditioned, is a 
philosophy professing relative knowledge, but confessing ab- 
solute ignorance." (Dis. p. 609.) Surely this is a pitiable 
enough conclusion to such an elaborate process. A mountain 
labors, and something infinitely less than the mouse emerges. 

I suspect that Sir William Hamilton was wont to meet all 
such objections, and try to escape from such a whirlpool as that 
in which Ferrier would engulf him, by taking refuge in belief, 
— in faith. And I am thoroughly persuaded of the sincerity of 
his faith, philosophic and religious. But it is unsatisfactory, it 
is unphilosophic, to allow that cognition and intelligence may 
lead to nihilism, and then resort to faith to save us from the 
consequences. Surely there is faith involved in the exercises 
of intelligence ; there is faith (philosophical) involved, when 
from a seen effect we look up to an unseen cause. I am 
sure that human intelligence does not lead to absolute knowl- 
edge, but as little does it lead to scepticism or to nothing. Of 
this I am further sure, that the same criticism which pretends 
to demonstrate that intelligence ends in absolute ignorance, 
will soon — probably in the immediately succeeding age — go 
on to show with the same success, that our beliefs are not to 
be trusted. 

The same doctrine of relativity carried out led him to deny 
that there could be any valid argument in behalf of the divine 
existence, except the moral one. I acknowledge that the 
moral argument, properly enunciated, is the most satisfactory 
of all. I admit that the argument from order and adaptation 
(the physico-theological) can prove no more, than that there is 
a living being of vast power and wisdom, presiding over the 
universe ; but this it can do by the aid of the law of cause and 
effect properly interpreted. The proof that this Being is in- 



446 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. [Art. lvii. 

finite must be derived from the mental intuition in regard to 
the infinite. Hamilton has deprived himself of the power of 
using the arguments from our belief in causation and infinity 
by what I regard as a defective and mutilated account of both 
these intuitions. He has nowhere stated the moral argument 
which he trusts in. I suspect that the criticism which cuts 
down the argument from intelligence, needs only to be carried 
a step further to undermine the argument from our moral 
nature. This process has actually taken place in Germany, 
and I have no desire to see it repeated among metaphysical 
youths in this country. It is on this account, mainly, that I 
have been so anxious to point out the gross defects in the 
account given by Hamilton of our necessary convictions. 

(2.) I dispute his doctrine of causation. It is so lamentably 
defective in the view taken of the nature of cause, and so per- 
versely mistaken in the theory grounded on this view, that 
several of his most distinguished disciples have been obliged to 
abandon it. The following is his account of effect and cause : 
"An effect is nothing more than the sum or complement of 
all the partial causes, the concurrence of which constitutes its 
existence." I remember no eminent philosopher who has 
given so inadequate a view of what constitutes cause. It 
leaves out the main element, — the power in the substance, or, 
more frequently, substances, acting as the cause to produce 
the effect. It leads him to represent the effect as an emana- 
tion from previously existing elements, a doctrine which he 
turns to no pantheistic use, but which has, undoubtedly, a 
pantheistic tendency. Taking such a view it is no wonder 
that he should represent creation as inconceivable ; for the 
only creation which he can conceive, according to his theory, 
is not a creation of a new substance by God, but a creation 
out of God. Thus defective is his view of cause in itself. His 
view of the internal principle, which leads us, when we discover 
an effect to look for a cause is equally inadequate. According 
to him it is a mere impotetice to conceive that there should not 
be something out of which this effect is formed ; and, to com- 
plete the insufficiency of his theory, he makes even this a law of 
thought and not of things. Surely all this is in complete oppo- 
sition to the consciousness to which he so often appeals. Our 
conviction as to cause is not a powerlessness, but a power ; not 



Art. lvii.] CAUSATION AND INFINITY. 447 

an inability, but an ability. It is an intuitive and necessary 
belief that this effect, and every other effect, must have a cause 
in something with power to produce it. 

(3.) I dispute his theory as to our conviction of infinity. 
" We are," he says, " altogether unable to conceive space as 
bounded — as finite ; that is, as a whole beyond which there is 
no farther space." " On the other hand, we are equally power- 
less to realize in thought the possibility of the opposite contra- 
dictory : we cannot conceive space infinite or without limits." 
(Vol. II., p. 369, 370.) The seeming contradiction here arises 
from the double sense in which the word " conceive " is used. 
In the second of these counter propositions the word is used 
in the sense of imaging or representing in consciousness, as 
when the mind's eye pictures a fish or a mermaid. In this 
signification we cannot have an idea or notion of the infinite. 
But the thinking, judging, believing power of the mind is not 
the same as the imaging power. The mind can think of the 
class fish, or even of the imaginary class mermaid, while it can- 
not picture the class. Now, in the first of the opposed proposi- 
tions the word " conceive " is taken in the sense of thinking, 
deciding, being convinced. We picture space as bounded, but 
we cannot think, judge, or believe it to be bounded. When 
thus explained all appearance of contradiction disappears — 
indeed all the contradictions which the Kantians, Hegelians, and 
Hamiltonians are so fond of discovering between our intuitive 
convictions, will vanish if we but carefully inquire into the 
nature of these convictions. Both propositions, when rightly 
understood, are true, and there is no contradiction. They 
stand thus : — " We cannot image space as without bounds : " 
" we cannot think that it has bounds or believe that it has 
bounds." The former may well be represented as a creature 
impotency ; the latter is, most assuredly, a creature potency, — 
is one of the most elevated and elevating convictions of which 
the mind is possessed, — and is a conviction of which it can 
never be shorn. 

It will be seen from these remarks that I refuse my adhe- 
rence to his peculiar theory of relativity, and to his maxim 
that " positive thought lies in the limitation or conditioning of 
one or other of two opposite extremes, neither of which, as 
unconditioned, can be realized to the mind as possible, and yet 



44§ SIR WILLIAM HAMLLTON. [Art. lvii. 

of which, as contradictions, one or other must, by the funda- 
mental laws of thought, be recognized as necessary." (Reid's 
" Works," p. 743.) It fails as to causation and as to infinity, and 
he has left no formal application of it to substance and quality, 
where, as Kant showed, there is no such infinite regressus, as 
in infinite time and space or cause. He would have found 
himself in still greater difficulties had he ventured elaborately 
to apply his theory to moral good. As I believe him to 
have been on the wrong track, I scarcely regret that he has 
not completed his system and given us a doctrine of rational 
psychology or ontology. Indeed I have no faith whatever in a 
metaphysics which pretends to do any more than determine, 
in an inductive manner, the laws and faculties of the mind, 
and, in doing so, to ascertain, formalize, and express the funda- 
mental principles of cognition, belief, judgment, and moral 
good. The study of logic began to revive from the time that 
Archbishop Whately constrained it to keep to a defined province. 
The study of metaphysics would be greatly promoted if the 
science would only learn to be a little more humble and less 
pretending, and confine itself to that which is attainable. 

Logic. We may now look at his work on Logic, which is a 
very elaborate one, and contains very able discussions and 
learned notes. It proceeds upon a very thorough acquaintance 
with Aristotle and his commentators, with the schoolmen and 
the logical writers of the seventeenth century ; but was directly 
suggested by the Kantian criticism and amendment of logic, and 
by the works of such men as Esser, Fries, Krug, and Drobisch, 
who carried out the principles of the great German metaphysi- 
cian. Just as the " Port Royal Logic " has all the excellencies 
and defects of the philosophy of Descartes, so the logic of 
Hamilton has the combined truth and error of the metaphysics 
of Kant. It should be added, that his analytic, so far drawn 
from German sources in some of its fundamental views, is, 
after all, Hamilton's own, in the way in which it is wrought 
out and applied. Logic is defined as " the science of the 
laws of thought as thought." It is represented to be an a 
priori science. "It considers the laws of thought proper as 
contained a priori in the nature of pure intelligence." He 
does not state, and evidently does not see, that these laws 
of thought, while not the laws of the objects of thought, 



Art. lvii.] LOGIC— THE CONCEPT. 449 

are laws of thought as employed about objects, and can be 
discovered not a priori, but simply by an observation of 
the workings of thought. 

He reviewed the not very philosophical but very shrewd 
and useful work of Whately, in the " Edinburgh Review " for 
1833, criticising it with terrible severity, and giving indications 
of his own views. He was already cogitating his system, he 
expounded it to his class after he became professor, and he 
gave it to the public in " An Essay toward a new Analytic 
of Logical Forms," being that which gained the prize proposed 
by Sir William Hamilton, in the year 1846, for the best ex- 
position of the new doctrine propounded in his lectures, with 
an historical appendix, by Thomas Spencer Baynes. It would 
require a treatise as elaborate as Hamilton's two volumes to 
state and examine it in detail, but I may notice some of the 
fundamental points. 

The Concept. It proceeds on the distinction between the 
extension and comprehension of a term or notion. He makes 
no pretensions to the discovery of this principle. He knew 
that it was stated in the " Port Royal Logic," and that it 
was taught in Glasgow University by Hutcheson. Professor 
Baynes has shown in his translation of the " Port Royal 
Logic " that there were anticipations of it in earlier works. 
Hamilton carries out the distinction more thoroughly than it 
had ever been before. " The comprehension of a concept is 
nothing more than the sum or complement of the distinguish- 
ing characters or attributes of which the concept is made up ; 
and the extension of a concept is nothing more than the sum 
or complement of the objects themselves, whose resembling 
characters were abstracted to constitute the concept." (Vol. I., 
p. 148.) If we except his exposition of this distinction, he 
does not seem to me to throw much light, otherwise, on the 
first part of logic, — the part as it appears to me which has 
most need to be cleared up. He draws no distinction between 
the general notion and the abstract notion, but treats of both 
under the one designation, concept. But surely there is a 
distinction between two such notions as "animal" on the one 
hand, embracing an indefinite number of objects, and "life," 
which has not a complement of objects, but is only an attribute 

of objects. 

29 



45° SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. [Art. i.vii. 

yudgment. He claims originality chiefly for his doctrine of 
the thorough quantification of the predicate. " Touching the 
principle of an explicitly quantified predicate, I had by 1833 
become convinced of the necessity to extend and correct the 
logical doctrine on this point." "Before 1840 I had become 
convinced that it was necessary to extend the principle equally 
to negatives." (Vol. II., p. 209.) This doctrine, as Professor 
Baynes shows, had been partially anticipated, but had never 
been fully carried out. I am inclined to admit that the credit, 
if there be any credit, in the thorough quantification of the 
predicate belongs to Hamilton. But I set no value on the 
supposed improvement. It proceeds on the simple logical postu- 
late, " to state explicitly what is thought implicitly." I admit 
the principle, but deny that it requires the predicate to be uni- 
versally quantified. When we say " the dog barks," we make 
the predication, without inquiring in thought whether there 
are or are not other dogs that bark, whether dogs are all or 
only some barking animals. When we say " man is rational," 
we do not determine whether or no there are other creatures 
that are rational ; whether, for example, angels may be called 
rational, whether men are " all " or only " some " rational. As 
the predicate is not always or even commonly quantified in 
spontaneous thought, so we do not require always to quantify 
it in the logical enunciation. At the same time, it is of impor- 
tance to be able to quantify it on demand, and thus to see 
reflectively what is involved in every proposition. 

In carrying out his principle, he adds to the four classes of 
propositions acknowledged in the received logic A, E, I, O, 
other four, — 

U. Common salt is chloride of sodium. 
Y. Some stars are all the planets. 
rj. No birds are some animals, 
co. Some common salt is not some chloride of sodium. 

I do regard it as of moment to place in a distinct class those 
propositions which assert the equivalence of subject and predi- 
cate (U). But the others seem to me to be converted or 
rather perverted forms that never do present themselves in 
spontaneous thought : in which we say instead " all the planets 
are stars," and " some animals are not birds," and that " chloride 



Art. lvii.] JUDGMENT. 45 1 

of sodium in this cellar is not the same as chloride of sodium 
in that salt-cellar." 

It is one of the supposed advantages of his analytic that it 
reduces the conversion of propositions from three species to 
one, — that of simple conversion. This holds true after we have 
converted the proposition into the form in which Hamilton has 
put it. When we say, "The bird sings," which is the form in 
spontaneous thought, Hamilton insists that logically it is, " The 
bird is some singing animal ; " and after we have thus converted 
it once, the second conversion follows simply, " Some singing 
animals are birds." But there is nothing saved by requiring us 
to put every proposition in a form so different from that which 
it assumes in spontaneous thought. 

Hamilton has done service to logic by unfolding more fully 
than had been done before what Kant called " syllogisms of 
the understanding," and which he calls immediate inferences, 
that is, inferences without a middle term, as when, from the 
proposition " All men have a conscience," we infer that some 
men have a conscience. He includes very properly under this 
head every form of conversion and opposition ; and it has been 
shown by him and others that it includes other immediate in- 
ferences which it is important to spread out to view. But in- 
stead of placing them under reasoning, they might be allowed 
to remain where conversion and opposition have usually been 
placed, in the second part of logic. 

Reasoning. It is an alleged advantage of his analytic that 
it is " the revocation of two terms of a proposition to their true 
relation ; a proposition being always an equation of its subject 
and predicate." So he says the proposition all men are mortal, 
means " all men = some mortal." That in some propositions 
the subject and predicate are equivalent may be allowed ; and 
in such cases there may be no impropriety in using the mathe- 
matical equation, though generally it is better to allow mathe- 
maticians to keep their own symbols, as in their science they have 
a definite meaning, a meaning in regard to quantity ; and if we 
introduce symbols into logic, let us introduce new symbols ap- 
propriated to the ideas. Human thought is employed about a 
great many other objects as well as quantity. When we say, 
4< Virtue leads to happiness," we are not uttering a quantitative 



45 2 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. [Art. lvii. 

statement, " Virtue = some things that lead to happiness ; " 
but primarily an attributive assertion, that virtue has the attri- 
bute of leading to happiness, and by implication in extension, 
" among the things that lead to happiness is virtue." 

The new analytic claims that it reduces all the general laws 
of categorical syllogisms to a single canon. But what is that 
canon ? I confess I have difficulty in finding it. Mr. Baynes 
states it : "A syllogism is the product of that act of mediate 
comparison " by which we recognized that two notions stand to 
each other in the relation of whole and part, through the recog- 
nition that these notions severally stand in the same relation 
to a third. This canon is vague enough till it is explained 
what is meant by the relation of whole and parts. There is 
valid ratiocination where the relationship does not seem that 
of whole and parts. 

Chloride of sodium is not common salt; 
Pepper is not chloride of sodium ; 
Therefore pepper is not common salt. 
In many cases the relation is one of whole and parts. But 
of what kind of whole ? Hamilton says that it is first one of 
comprehension, and complains that logicians have overlooked 
it. Thus (Vol. I., p. 272): — 

Every morally responsible agent is a free agent ; 

Man is a morally responsible agent ; 

Therefore man is a free agent, — 
which is thus explained : The notion man comprehends in it 
the notion responsible agent ; but the notion responsible agent 
comprehends in it the notion free agent ; therefore, on the 
principle that a part of a part is a part of a whole, the notion 
man also comprehends in it the notion free agent. 

But it is clear to me that in every one of these propositions 
there is generalization or extension implied. We have " every 
responsible agent," "every man," and in the class of "free 
agents," or " some free agents." I acknowledge that there is 
also comprehension involved, for all extension involves com- 
prehension. But the uppermost thought seems to me to be in 
extension : Man is in the class responsible ; which again is in the 
class free agent ; consequently man is in the class free agent. 
Unless our knowledge of attributes is such as to enable us 



Art. lvii.] REASONING. 453 

thus to form classes, the reasoning is not valid ; and the 
best form in which to bring out the principle involved is, — 
All responsible agents are free agents ; 
But man is a responsible agent ; 
Therefore he is a free agent. 

But if this be so, then we are back to the dictum, " What- 
ever is true of a class is true of all the members of the class." 
But as all extension involves comprehension, it is of moment 
to be able on demand to put reasoning in the form of compre- 
hension. 

It is urged in favor of the practical value of the analytic, 
that it makes figure unessential and reduction unnecessary. 
But it enlarges the number of legitimate moods, making them 
36 under each figure, or in all 108, — a number which is apt to 
frighten the student. 

He vacillates in his account of hypotheticals and disjunctives. 
His final opinion is given (Vol. II., 370-378 — "Hypothet- 
icals (conjunctive and disjunctive), April 30, 1849"). "These 
syllogisms appear to be only modifications or corruptions of 
certain immediate inferences, for they have only two terms, and 
obtain a third proposition only by placing the general rule of 
inference (stating, of course, the possible alternatives), disguised, 
it is true, as the major premises." 

He had divided logic into pure and modified, and he treats of 
the latter in Vol. II. He doubts whether there can be a modi- 
fied logic ; and is ever striving to impart to what he says un- 
der that head a rigidly technical form. The remarks which he 
throws out are often characterized by much intellectual ability, 
and some of them are of great value. But most of the topics 
discussed do not admit of so formal a treatment as he would 
give them. His account of the Baconian induction is a failure. 
The truth is, he never appreciated or understood the method 
pursued in the physical sciences. 

The appendix contains a miscellaneous but very valuable set 
of papers on logical subjects. I doubt much whether Hamilton's 
system of logic will ever as a whole be adopted by our colleges. 
We have, however, two admirable text-books founded on it : — 
Thomson's " Outline of the Laws of Thought" and Bowen's 
" Logic." It will be acknowledged by all, that the discussions 
he has raised have done more to clear up unsettled points in 



454 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. [Art. lvii. 

formal logic than any work published since the days of Kant. 
These discussions will be looked at by writers on logic in 
all coming ages. 

In parting with this great man, now gone from our world, it 
is most satisfactory to notice what was the professed aim of all 
his philosophy, — it was to point out the limits to human thought, 
and thereby to teach man the lesson of intellectual humility. 
It is instructive to find that this has been the aim of not 
a few of the most profound philosophers with which our world 
has been honored. The truth is, it is always the smallest 
minds which are most apt to be swollen with the wind engen- 
dered by their own vanity. The intellects which have gone out 
with greatest power to the farthest limits are those which feel 
most keenly the barriers by which man's capacity is bounded. 
The minds that have set out on the widest excursions, and 
which have taken the boldest flights, are those which know best 
that there is a wider region beyond, which is altogether inacces- 
sible to man. It was the peculiarly wise man of the Hebrews 
who said, " No man can find out the work that God maketh 
from the beginning to the end." The Greek sage by emphasis 
declared that if he excelled others it was only in this, that he 
knew that he knew nothing. It was the avowed object of the 
sagacious Locke to teach man the length of his tether, — which, 
we may remark, those feel most who attempt to get away from 
it. Reid labored to restrain the pride of philosophy, and to 
bring men back to a common sense in respect of which the 
peasant and philosopher are alike. It was the design of Kant's 
great work to show how little the speculative reason can accom- 
plish. And now we have Sir William Hamilton showing within 
what narrow limits the thought of man is restrained ; and the 
metaphysician, par excellence, of Oxford has, in the Bampton 
lectures, employed this philosophy to lay a restraint on the 
rational theology of Britain, and the speculative theology 
which is coming like a fog from the German Ocean. It is pleas- 
ant to think that Sir William Hamilton ever professed to bow 
with reverence before the revelations of the Bible, and takes 
delight in stating it to be the result of all his investigations, 
" that no difficulty emerges in theology which had not previously 
emerged in philosophy." In one of the letters which the author 



Art. lviii.] METAPHYSICS OF THE FUTURE. 455 

of this article has had from him he proceeds on the great Bible 
doctrines of grace ; and from all I know of him personally, 
I am prepared to believe in the account which I have heard 
from what I reckon competent authority, that the prayer which 
came from him at his dying hour was, " God be merciful to me, 
a sinner." It is most instructive to perceive the publican and 
the philosopher thus made to stand on the same level before the 
all-righteous Judge. 



Will.— THE METAPHYSICS OF THE FUTURE. 

What are we to make in these times of metaphysics ? It is 
quite clear that this kind of investigation has lost, I suspect 
for ever, the position once allowed it, when it stood at the head 
of all secular knowledge, and claimed to be equal, or all but 
equal, in rank to theology itself. "Time was," says Kant, 
" when she was the queen of all the sciences ; and if we take 
the will for the deed, she certainly deserves, so far as regards 
the high importance of her object-matter, this title of honor. 
Now it is the fashion to heap contempt and scorn upon her ; 
and the matron mourns forlorn and forsaken like Hecuba." 
Some seem inclined to treat her very much as they treat those 
de jure sovereigns wandering over Europe whom no country 
will take as de facto sovereigns, — that is, they give her all out- 
ward honor, but no authority ; others are prepared to set aside 
her claims very summarily. The multitudes who set value on 
nothing but what can be counted in money never allow them- 
selves to speak of metaphysics except with a sneer. The ever- 
increasing number of persons who read, but who are indisposed 
to think, complain that philosophy is not so interesting as the 
new novel, or the pictorial history, which is quite as exciting. 
and quite as untrue as the novel. The physicist, who has kept 
a register of the heat of the atmosphere at nine o'clock in the 
morning for the last five years, and the naturalist, who has dis- 
covered a plant or insect, distinguished from all hitherto known 
species by an additional spot, cannot conceal their contempt 
for a department of inquiry which deals with objects which can 
neither be seen nor handled, neither weighed nor measured. 



456 METAPHYSICS OF THE FUTURE. [Art. lviii. 

In the face of all this scorn I boldly affirm that mental 
philosophy is not exploded, and that it never will be exploded. 
Whatever men may profess or affect, they cannot, in fact, do 
without it. It often happens that a profession of contempt for 
all metaphysics, as being futile and unintelligible, is often an 
introduction to a discussion which is metaphysical without the 
parties knowing it (just as the person in the French play had 
spoken prose all his life without being aware of it) ; and of 
such metaphysics it will commonly be found that they are 
futile and unintelligible enough. Often is Aristotle denounced 
in language borrowed from himself, and the schoolmen are dis- 
paraged by those who are all the while using distinctions which 
they have cut with sharp chisel in the rock, never to be effaced. 
There are persons speaking with contempt of Plato, Descartes, 
Locke, and all the metaphysicians, who are taking advan- 
tage of the great truths which they have discovered. Perhaps 
these individuals are telling you very solemnly that they prefer 
the practical to the theoretical, or that they care little for the 
form if they have the matter, and are profoundly ignorant that 
they are all the while using distinctions introduced by the 
Stagyrite, and elaborated into their present shape by the scho- 
lastics. But surely, they will tell you, the discovery of a new 
species of an old genus is a more important event than all your 
philosophic discoveries ; and they will be surprised to learn 
that we owe the introduction of the phrases genus and species 
to Plato or to Socrates. , Or perhaps they boast that they can 
have ideas without the aid of the philosophers, forgetting that 
Plato gave us the word idea, while Descartes and Locke brought 
it to its present signification. " Ah, but," says our novel 
reader, eager to discover whether the heroine so sad and for- 
lorn in the second volume is to fall in with her lover, and 
be married to him before the close of the third, "meta- 
physics are associated in my mind with a dreary desert without 
and a headache within ; " and is quite unaware that he is able 
so to express himself, because philosophers have explained that 
ideas are associated. I could easily show that in our very 
sermons from the pulpit, and orations in the senate, and plead- 
ings at the bar, principles are ever and anon appealed to which 
have come from the heads of our deepest thinkers in ages long 
gone by, and who may now be forgotten by all but a few anti- 



Art. lviii.] SHOULD CALL IN PHYSIOLOGY. 457 

quarians in philosophy. Our very natural science, in the 
hands of such men as Faraday and Mayer, is ever touching on 
the borders of metaphysics, and compelling our physicists to 
rest on certain fundamental convictions as to extension and 
force. The truth is, in very proportion as material science 
advances, do thinking minds feel the need of something to go 
down deeper and mount up higher than the senses can do ; 
of some means of settling those questions which the mind 
is ever putting in regard to the soul, and the relation of the 
universe to God ; and of a foundation on which the understand- 
ing can ultimately and confidently repose. 

II. Metaphysics may have now to take anew start by taking 
advantage of physiological research. The Scottish school 
has never been slow to profit by the discoveries of science as 
to the brain, the nerves, the senses. From the first, and all 
along, they embraced and used all that was established in re- 
gard to the eye not being originally percipient of distance, to 
the distinction between the nerves of sensation, and to the 
reflex system in the human body ; and they set themselves 
against premature and rash hypotheses by Hartley, by Eras- 
mus Darwin, and by the phrenologists. But physiology in its 
natural and necessary progress is coming nearer and closer to 
the line which divides mind from matter, and in these circum- 
stances mental science has both to watch and profit by the 
investigations which are being so diligently pursued. 

First, metaphysics must restrain the rash inferences of mere 
physiologists, as Reid did the vibration theory of Hartley, as 
Brown did the hypotheses of Darwin as to life, and as Hamil- 
ton did the pretended science of craniology. They must make 
the whole educated community know, believe, and realize, that 
such physical actions as attraction, repulsion, and motion are 
one set of phenomena, and perception, reasoning, desire, and 
moral discernment another and a very different set of phe- 
nomena. We can trace so far into the brain what takes place 
when the mother sees her son thrown out from a boat on the 
wild waves ; we can follow the rays of light through the eye 
on to the retina, to the sensorium, possibly on to the gray mat- 
ter in the periphery of the brain ; and in the end physiology 
may throw some light on the whole cerebral action. But in the 
end, as at the beginning, we are in the domain of matter and 



45§ METAPHYSICS OF THE FUTURE. [Art. lviii. 

motion ; we have only the same action as takes place in the brain 
of the dog as it looks on. But when the mothers affection rises 
up, when she forgets herself in thinking of her boy, when she 
uses expedients for rescuing him, when she resolves to plunge 
into the water and buffets the billows till she clasps her boy 
and lavishes her affection on him, we are in a region beyond 
that reached by the physiologist, — a region which I believe he 
can never reach ; and it is of importance to tell him so. But 
the psychologist can reach that region by consciousness, and 
ought diligently to explore it. Whatever be the pretensions it 
makes, physiology has hitherto thrown little light on purely 
mental phenomena, and none whatever on higher mental action, 
such as ratiocination, the idea of the good, and resistance to 
temptation. 

Secondly, the metaphysician must enter the physiological 
field. He must, if he can, conduct researches ; he must at 
least master the ascertained facts. He must not give up the 
study of the nervous system and brain to those who cannot 
comprehend any thing beyond what can be made patent to the 
senses or disclosed to the microscope. I do cherish the hope 
that physiological psychology may in the end be rewarded 
by valuable discoveries. Light may be thrown on purely men- 
tal action by the fact that sensory action travels to the brain 
at the rate of 144.32 feet in the second, and from the brain at 
the rate of 108.24 ; that the movement is slowest in the case of 
the sense of sight and quickest in touch ; and by what is alleged 
by Donders that a thought requires gV °f a second. There 
are mental actions which cannot well be explained by mental 
laws, such as the rise of certain states and the association of 
certain states ; the rise, for instance, and the association of 
cheerful thoughts in the time of health, and of gloomy thoughts 
when we are laboring under derangement of the stomach. 
There may here be latent processes which do not fall under 
consciousness, but may be detected by the microscope or 
chemical analysis. By such researches the results reached by 
the psychologist may be so far modified on the one hand and 
considerably widened on the other. But all such investigations 
should be conducted by those who can understand and appre- 
ciate the peculiar nature of mental phenomena, and allow them 
their full and legitimate space. No physiologist can talk of, 



Art. lviii.] FUNDAMENTAL TRUTH. 459 

or so much as refer to, mental action without speaking of feel- 
ings, affections, thoughts, fancies, imaginations, desires, pur- 
poses, resolves ; but no eye, no mechanical instrument, can 
detect these. They cannot be weighed in the balance or 
measured by the line. There is a division of the mental facul- 
ties commonly adopted in the present day into the senses and 
the intellect, the emotions and the will ; but this distribution is 
suggested by the inward sense, and could never be discovered 
by an inspection of the compartments of the brain. 

III. Metaphysics will now require to determine by the aid of 
physical science what truth there is in idealism. All is not 
real that may seem or be declared to be so. The sky is not a 
vault ; color is produced on the visual organism by vibration 
in a medium ; the pleasure is not in the musical sounds. To 
save realism we are obliged to draw distinctions, say with 
Aristotle, between common and proper percepts, or with Locke 
and the Scottish school, between the primary and secondary 
qualities of matter. But I have a strong conviction that all 
such distinctions may only be partially correct, and are only 
provisionally applicable. But as physical and physiological 
science make farther progress, we may ascertain the exact 
truth, and find that it clears up many obscure points. As the 
facts are ascertained, metaphysics should take them up, and, 
combining our intuitive perceptions with them, may determine 
precisely what we are entitled to affirm of matter. In the end 
some of the statements of the Scottish school as to the precise 
nature of the external reality may be modified or even set 
aside. But the great truths propounded by such men as Ham- 
ilton will only be established, and seen to rest on a basis which 
can never be moved. It will be acknowledged that there is an 
external thing independent of mind, and that this is extended, 
and has a passive potency. However much we may refine it, 
enough will be left of matter to undermine Berkleianism and 
every form of idealism. 

IV. Metaphysics may be able to give a more accurate ex- 
pression of fundamental truth. It is one of the peculiar excel- 
lencies of the Scottish school that they stand up for first truths 
which cannot be proven on the one hand nor set aside on the 
other. They are not just agreed as to the form which they should 
take, or the language in which they should be expressed. Mr. 



460 METAPHYSICS OF THE FUTURE. [Art. lviii. 

J. S. Mill and Mr. Herbert Spencer think that they can account 
for all or many of these by the association of ideas or heredity. 
But neither of these thinkers is so bold as to maintain that 
he has done away with all fundamental truth. It can be 
shown that Mr. Mill is for ever appealing to truths which he 
assumes and regards himself as entitled to assume. (See 
" Examination of the Philosophy of J. S. Mill.") Mr. Spencer 
falls back on a law of necessity which testifies to a great un- 
known, which he allots as a territory to faith and to religion. I 
do not admit that he has given a proper expression to the fun- 
damental verity or fundamental verities which he assumes. 
He starts on the principle of relativity, as expounded by Ham- 
ilton and Mansel, the authoritative metaphysicians when he 
began to speculate. I do not admit that the known logically 
or metaphysically implies the unknown. I am sure that his fol- 
lowers will leave behind them as they advance this unknown 
region of faith. Following out his own method, they will ac- 
count for it all by circumstances working from generation to 
generation. But as Mill and Spencer have not been able to 
get rid of first truths, so no others will, and this whether they 
avow it or no. All processes must conduct to something ulti- 
mate. Thought requires a final resting-place, which will be 
found self-evident, necessary, universal. The age demands 
that the whole subject be rediscussed, with the view of deter- 
mining what are the first, the last, and the everlasting principles 
of thought and truth. Some of those defended by the Scottish 
metaphysicians may be derivative, but they will be found to 
imply a root from which they are sprung. 



APPENDIX. 



APPENDIX. 



Art. I. Extracts from MS. Letters of Francis Hutcheso7i to the Rev. 
Thomas Drennan, Minister of First Presbyterian {non-subscribing) 
Congregation, Belfast ; lent me by his grandson, Dr. Drennan. {See 
p. 64.) 

Glasgow, Jan. 31, 1737. — I am glad your present situation is agreeable to you. 
I must insist on your promise of a visit whenever you find honest Mr. Haliday 
(Mr. Drennan's colleague) in good health, so that he could take the whole bur- 
den for a month or six weeks. Robert Simson, with you and Charles Moor, 
would be wondrous happy till three in a morning ; I would be with you from five 
to ten. I can write you little news. Our college is very well this year as to num- 
bers and quality of scholars, but the younger classes are less numerous as people 
here grow less set on a college education for lads designed for business. ... I 
must tell you a shameful story of our college. My letter I wrote from Dublin 
stopped Clotworthy O'Neal getting his degree upon his first application. He got 
some folks in this country who are tools of the court to recommend the matter 
to our principal. He made a compliment of twenty guineas to the college 
library, and the principal watched an opportunity when there was a thin meet- 
ing, but his tools all present, and carried to him a degree in ; that too, only 

an honorary one, and declared so in the diploma without any certificate for his 
learning or manners. My dissent is entered in the books, and four more masters 
decline signing it." 

April 17, 1738. — Robert Simson, if he were not indolent beyond imagination, 
could in a fortnight's application finish another book which would surprise the 
connoisseurs. About November last, I sent a manuscript to Will Bruce chiefly 
for his and Mr. Abernethy's perusal. He showed it to the Bishop of Derry, 
who, it seems, is much pleased with it, and promises me a long epistle soon. I 
heartily wish you had seen it, but it did not get to Dublin till February, and was 
in the bishop's hands till the beginning of this month. I believe Will is perusing 
it now. I am not expecting it back again speedily. During our college session 
I get nothing done, but if I get them back during our vacation, with remarks of 
my friends, I shall endeavor to put the last hand to them. If I can get leisure 
next month, I shall endeavor to send you such a letter as I once gave you an im- 
perfect promise of, if my hand be not gone out of use. We have at last got a 
minister in Glasgow to my taste. As I know your laziness, I really wish you and 
he could interchange sermons now and then. I am surprised to find some peo- 
ple of very good sense, laymen more than clergy, here not a little pleased with 
some of the notions of the foreign mystics ; they have raised my curiosity of 
late to look into these books. I shall, sometime or other, let you know the result 
of my reading that way. I am persuaded their warm imaginations would make 
them moving preachers. I am going to read Madame Bourignon when I have 
leisure. You'll make Sam Haliday laugh heartily by telling him this particular. 
My most hearty respects to him. 



464 APPENDIX. 

Glasgow, March 5, 1738-39. — I had yours of the 26th of February on Friday, 
and could not answer sooner. I had resolved, when I first read yours, to have 
wrote you in the negative, being in as much hurry at present as I have been this 
session by many letters of business as well as by my ordinary work. I have got 
on my hands almost the whole paternal care of my old pupil Lord Kilmarnock's 
three sons here. But upon reading over your letter this morning, with the 
deepest concern for that worthy, friendly, generous man, I could not refuse you 
altogether what you desire ; though I concluded it must be either an unrea- 
sonable diffidence in yourself or an unjust value your friendship makes you put 
upon what comes from me, that occasions such requests. I shall be forced to 
work in starts, with many interruptions, which never succeeds right with me ; and 
beseech you be as busy as you can in some scheme of your own, and don't take 
any sudden interrupted attempts of mine as fit for all the purposes you say are 
expected by friends on this occasion. I hint to you my plan that you may work 
upon it, and be the readier to patch up a right thing out of the two : — "A consid- 
eration of what sort of .life is most worthy and best suited to a being capable of 
such high endowments, and improvements, and actions destined to an immortal 
existence, and yet subjected for a certain space to a mortal existence in this 
world, and then without drawing a character, leaving it to the audience to recol- 
lect how much of this appeared in our friend's life." 

I hope Jack Smith has sent down to your town a " Serious Address to the Kirk 
of Scotland," lately published in London ; it has run like lightning here, and is 
producing some effect ; the author is unknown ; he wrote with anger and con- 
tempt of the Kirk and Confession ; but it has a set of objections against the Con- 
fession which I imagine few will have the brow to answer. 

I really suffer with you heartily in the loss of your worthy friend ; you will 
miss him exceedingly, and so will your cause. 

A worthy lad in this town, one Robert Foulis, out of a true public spirit, 
undertook to reprint for the populace an old excellent book, "A Persuasive to 
Mutual Love and Charity," wrote by White, Oliver Cromwell's chaplain ; it is a 
divine old-fashioned thing. Some are cast off in better paper, sold at gd. in 
marble paper ; the coarse ones are sold at 5^. in blue paper, and at 4^. to book- 
sellers. I wish your booksellers would commission a parcel of both sorts. 
There has been some whimsical buffoonery about my heresy, of which I will send 
you a copy. 

Glasgow, June I, 1741. 1 — Our countrymen very generally have such an affec- 
tation of being men and gentlemen immediately, and of despising every thing in 
Scotland, that they neglect a great deal of good, wise instruction they might have 
here. I am truly mortified with a vanity and foppery prevailing among our 
countrymen beyond what I see in others ; and a softness and sauntering forsooth 
which makes them incapable of any hearty drudgery at books. We had five or 
six young gentlemen from Edinburgh, men of fortune and fine genius at my class, 
and studying law ; our Irishmen thought them poor book-worms. 

Glasgow, June 15, 1741. — The wretched turn their minds take is to the silly 
manliness of taverns. ... I shall not leave Glasgow except about three weeks 
in July for this whole vacation, but have more avocations by too numerous an 
acquaintance than you can imagine. In short, Tom, I find old age not in gray 
hairs and other trifles, but in an incapacity of mind for such close thinking or 
composition as I once had, and have pretty much dropped the thoughts of some 
great designs I had once sketched out. In running over my papers I am quite 

1 In this letter, and in several of those that follow, there is a great deal said about a young man 
named Robert Haliday, who is studying at Glasgow, and about whom Hutcheson is very anxious. 



APPENDIX. 465 

dissatisfied with method, style, matter, and some reasonings, though I don't 
repent my labor, as by it and the thoughts suggested by friends, — a multitude 
of which I had from W. Bruce and Synge, and still more in number from some 
excellent friends here, — I am fitter for my business ; but, as to composing in 
order, I am quite bewildered, and am adding confusedly to a confused book all 
valuable remarks in a farrago, to refresh my memory in my class lectures on 
several subjects. You'll find the like. Pray lay up a good stock of sermons. 
You would see a noble one by one of my Scotch intimates, who sees all I do, 
Mr. Leechman. 

Glasgmu, April 12, 1742. You are such a lazy wretch that I should never write 
you more. Not one word of answer to my congratulatory epistle you got six 
weeks before you were married. Not one word of godly admonitions about 
spending an evening with friends at the Welshes Head, and other pious senti- 
ments about the vanity and folly of staying at home in the evenings. 

Glasgow, May 31, 1742. — The bearer, Mr. Hay, takes over some copies of a 
new translation of Antoninus, the greater half of which, and more, was my 
amusement last summer for the sake of a singular worthy soul, one Foulis ; but I 
don't let my name appear in it, nor indeed have I told it to any here but the man 
concerned : I hope you'll like it. The rest was done by a very ingenious lad, one 
Moore. Pray try your critical faculties in finding what parts I did, and what he 
did. I did not translate books in suite ; but I one or two, and he one or two. I 
hope if you like it that it may sell pretty well with you about Belfast. I am sure 
it is doing a public good to diffuse the sentiments ; and, if you knew Foulis, you 
would think he well deserved all encouragement. 

Date cut off. — Having this opportunity, I must trouble you with a small affair. 
Upon conversation with Mr. Brown, who came lately from Ireland, along with Mr. 
Alexander Haliday, about the circumstances of some ministers, very worthy men, 
in your presbytery, it occurred to me that a little liberality could not be better 
exercised than among them. I am concerned that in my prosperous circum- 
stances I did not think of it sooner. If you have any little contributions made 
towards such as are more distressed than the rest, you may mark me as a subscriber 
for 5/. per annum, and take the above ten pounds as my payment for the two 
years past. Alexander Young will advance it immediately, as I wrote him lately 
that I would probably draw such a bill, without telling him the purposes. I think 
it altogether proper you should not mention my name to your brethren, but conceal 
it. I am already called New Light here. I don't value it for myself, but I see it 
hurts some ministers here, who are most intimate with me. I have been these 
ten days in great hurry and perplexity, as I have for that time foreseen the death 
of our professor, who died last Wednesday, and some of my colleagues join me in 
laboring for Mr. Leechman to succeed. We are not yet certain of the event, but 
have good hopes. If he succeeds, it will put a new face upon theology in Scot- 
land. I am extremely concerned for your divisions in Belfast. I find they talk of 
Jack Maxwell of Armagh or young Kennedy. The talents of this latter I know 
not, but believe he has a very honest heart. Jack Maxwell is an ingenious, 
lively fellow, for any thing I could discover. That presbytery will miss him 
much. Pray write me now sometimes. I am sorr} the event in your family 
made some hints in my last so seasonable. But your son is now as well as if he 
had lived sixty years a Plato or a Caesar, or if he is not, life is scarce worth spend- 
ing under such a Providence : we should all long vdwp ml yala yivtadat. 

Glasgow, August 5, 1743. — I have had two letters of late from Mr. Mussenden; 
one about five weeks ago, with an invitation to Mr. Leechman to succeed Dr. 
Kilpatrick. Leechman was then just upon his marriage. I concluded the matter 

30 



466 APPENDIX. 

quite impracticable, and returned an answer to that purpose ; and, upon convers- 
ing, Leechman found I was not then mistaken. He was lately very ill treated by 
our judges in a discretionary augmentation he applied for, which they could have 
given with full consent of parties. His wife is not so averse to removal as for- 
merly. Indeed the difficulty is with himself. You never knew a better, sweeter 
man, — of excellent literature, and, except his air and a little roughness of voice, 
the best preacher imaginable. You could not get a greater blessing among you of 
that kind. As I have heard nothing from other hands, I want fuller information. 
Are the people generally hearty for Leechman upon the character they hear? Is 
there no other worthy man on the field ? Unless these points be cleared, he will take 
no steps. I remember one Millan, an assistant. Pray is he to be continued, and 
no way affronted or neglected in this design ? Leechman is well as he is, and 
happy, though preaching to a pack of horse-copers and smugglers of the rudest 
sort. He would do nothing hard or disagreeable to any worthy man, and has no 
desire of change. But if the field be clear, it were peccare in publico. coi7imoda not 
to force him out of that obscure hole where he is so much lost. He was the man 
I wished in the first place to be our professor of theology. ... I have no news 
but that we expect immediately from Robert Simson a piece of amazing geometry, 
reinventing two books of Appollonius, and he has a third almost ready. He 
is the best geometer in the world, reinventing old books, of which Pappius pre- 
serves only a general account of the subjects. 

Glasgow, Sept. 20, 1743. — I had the favor of yours by Mr. Blow, but could 
not return an answer by him, being much employed in promoting the affair you 
wrote about. I had also very urgent letters from Messrs. Mairs and Duchals to 
the same purpose. 'Tis very difficult to persuade a modest worthy man who is 
tolerably settled, to adventure upon a new scene of affairs among strangers. I 
shall use my utmost endeavors to prevail upon him as I have been doing for some 
time past. I am sorry I cannot give you great hopes of success , but I don't yet 
so despair as to quit solicitation, as he is exceedingly moved with the affection 
and generosity of that people. My most humble and hearty respects to your 
brethren of your presbytery, whom I shall always remember with the greatest 
esteem and affection. 

Glasgow, Feb. 20, 1743-44. — I am not a little surprised that I have not heard 
from you these four months past, though there were some of my letters which any 
other person would have thought required an answer. I could tell you a good 
deal of news upon the unexpected election of a professor of divinity, and the 
furious indignation of our zealots ; but you deserve no news from anybody. We 
have our own concern about the settlement in Belfast, but we are to expect no 
accounts from you of any thing. Pray tell Mrs. Haliday her son is doing very 
well. ... I was never more honored than since our late professor's death. Our 
hearty respects to Mrs. Drennan, and sympathy on the loss of her boys. 

Dicimus autem hos quoque felices qui ferre incommoda vitae 
Nee jactare jugum vita dedicere magistra. 

Glasgow, April 16, 1746. — Our public news of the 15th from Edinburgh was, 
that the duke had passed the Spey, that 2,000 rebels on the banks fled precipi- 
tately upon his pointing his cannon at them. They may reassemble, and, as they 
are very cunning, may have some artifice to surprise ; but I cannot but hope they 
are dispersing, and their chiefs making their escape. You have heard no doubt 
of our taking from them the " Hazard " sloop they had taken at Montrose. She 
returned from France with 150 men and arms and ammunition, and had landed 
them; but Lord Rea verv boldly attacked them with a smaller number, and took 



APPENDIX. 467 

them all prisoners with 13,000/. sterling. The same man-of-war took another of 
their ships, with arms and ammunitions, which had seized twelve small merchant- 
men in Orkneys for their use. The duke has endeared himself to some of his 
very enemies by his good sense and humanity, void of all state or pride. 

I had this day a letter from a presbytery of Pennsylvania, of a very good turn, 
regretting their want of proper ministers and books, expecting some assistance 
here ; it was of a very old date of October last. I shall speak to some wise men 
here, but would as soon speak to the Roman conclave as our presbytery. The 
Pennsylvanians regret the want of true literature ; that Whitfield has promoted a 
contempt of it among his followers, and bewailing some wretched contentions 
among themselves. The only help to be expected from you is sending some wise 
men if possible. I shall send them my best advice about books and philosophy, 
and hope to be employed to buy them books cheaper here than they are to be got 
anywhere. I long for a fuller letter about all your chat and news. I am in a 
great deal of private distresses about Jo Wilson and his sister, — the latter in the 
utmost danger, the other scarce recovered from death, my wife too very tender ; 
but by a set of most intricate business, upon which the soul of this college 
depends, and all may be ruined by the want of one vote, I cannot leave this till 
after the 26th of June, and we go to Dublin first. 



Art. II. Questions proposed in the Philosophical Society in Aberdeen 

{see p. 227). 

1. President. — Whether the greatest part of the matter that composes the 
bodies of vegetables and animals is not air or some substance that is mixed 
with the air and floats in it. Handled, Feb. 8. 

2. Dr. Skene. — What are the proper characters of enthusiasm and supers 
stition, and their natural effects upon the human mind ? Handled, Jan. 25. 

3. Mr. Trail. — What are the proper methods of determining the sun's par- 
allax by the transit of Venus over his disk in 1761 ? Handled, April 12. 

4. Mr. Campbell. — What is the cause of that pleasure we have from repre- 
sentations or objects which excite pity or other painful feelings ? Handled, 
Feb. 8. 

5. What is the true cause of the ascent, suspension, and fall of vapors in the 
atmosphere ? Mr. Stewart. Handled, Feb. 22. 

6. Mr. Reid. — Whether some part of that food of plants which is contained 
in the air is not absorbed by the earth, and in the form a watery fluid conveyed 
into the vessels of plants. And whether any thing can enter into the vessels of 
plants that is not perfectly soluble in water. Handled, March 8. 

7. President. — Is there a standard of taste in the fine arts and in polite writ- 
ing ; and how is that standard to be ascertained ? Handled, March 22, and 
May 10. 

8. Dr. Skene. — How far human actions are free or necessary. Handled, 
May 24, and June 14. 

9. How far the motion of the earth and of light accounts for the aberration of 
the fixed stars. Mr. Trail. Handled, April 12. 

10. Mr. Campbell. — Can the generation of worms in the bodies of animals be 
accounted for on the common principles of generation. Handled, June 28. 



468 APPENDIX. 

11. Is the human soul confined to any part of the human body; and, if so, to 
what part ? Mr. Stewart. Handled, June 28. 

12. Mr. Reid. — Are the objects of the human mind properly divided into 
impressions and ideas ? And must every idea be a copy of a preceding impres- 
sion. Handled, July 13 and 26. 

Jan. 25, no questions. Feb. 8, 22. March 8, none. 
March 22, 1758. 

13. Mr. Gordon. — What is the origin of polytheism? Handled, Aug. 10. 

14. Mr. Gerard. — What are the proper subjects of demonstrative reasoning ? 
Handled, Aug. 23, and Sept. 13. 

April 12. 

15. Mr. Farquhar. — Upon what the characters of men chiefly depend? 
Nov. 15. 

16. What is the apparent figure of the heavens, and what are the causes of it? 
Humanist, Nov. 15. 

17. Whether justice be a natural or artificial virtue. Nov. 22. 

April 22. 

18. Mr. Farquhar. — In the perfection of what faculty does genius consist? 
Or if in a combination of faculties what are they ? Superseded, because the sub- 
ject of Mr. Gerard's discourses. 

19. What are the parts of the body so connected with the several faculties of 
the mind that the destruction of those parts brings on a destruction of the exer- 
cise of those faculties. Dec. 13. 

20. Dr. Gregorie. — What are the plants that enrich a soil and what are those 
that impoverish it, and what are the causes of their enriching it, and impoverish- 
ing it? Feb. 11, 1759. 

21. Dr. Skene. — Wherein does happiness consist ? March 28. 

22. Whether the ideas of mixed modes are to be considered as the mere creat- 
ures of the mind, or are formed after patterns, as well as the ideas of the sub- 
stances whereof they are modes. Mr. Trail, Feb. 11, 1759. 

23. Mr. Campbell. — Wither nyafter has a separate y/(& permanent exigence. 
The nature of contrariety. May 30. 

24. Mr. Stewart. — Whether the sense of hearing may not be asserted by act, 
in like manner as that of seeing is by optical glasses. April 11. 

25. Mr. Reid. — Whether mankind with regard to morals always was and is 
the same. June 12. 

26. In what cases and for what causes is lime a proper manure ? Mr. Thos. 
Gordon. July 24, and Aug. 14. 

27. Mr. Gerard. — What is the origin of civil government ? June 26. 

28. Mr. Farquhar. — What is the foundation of moral obligation ? Sept. 26. 

29. Mr. Ross. — How can it be accounted for that an inflammable spirit is 
obtained from regenerated tartar (vinegar saturated with chalk or saccharum 
saturne by distillation) ? Or how comes it about that vinegar is restored to the 
state of an ardent spirit by being distilled with fixed alkali, chalk, or lead ? Oct. 
16, 1759. 

30. Dr. Gregorie. — Whether the Socratic method of instruction or that of 
prelection is preferable. Jan. 8, 1760. 

31. How far the ancient method of education in public seminaries from ear- 
liest infancy was preferable or inferior to the modern practice. By Dr. Skene, 
Nov. 27, 1759. 

32. Mr. Trail. — What is the Agrian law which will conduce most to the pop- 
ulousness of a nation ? Or what is the maximum of estates fittest for that pur- 



APPENDIX. 469 

33. Whether education in public schools or by private tutors be preferable. 
Principal Campbell, Dec. 11, 1759, and Feb. 26, 1760. 

34. Mr. Stewart. — Whether the time allotted for teaching Greek in the uni- 
versities of Scotland be not too short, and, if so, what would be the proper rem- 
edy. Feb. 26, 1760. 

35. Mr. Reid. — Whether it is proper to educate children without instilling 
principles into them of*any kind whatsoever. April 1, 1760. 

36. Mr. Gordon. — Whether there be not, in the very nature of our teaching 
societies, a tendency to stop farther advancement in those branches of learning 
which they profess. And, if it is so, what is the best remedy. June 24, and 
July 9, 1760. 

37. Prof. Gerard. — In what manner the general course of education may be 
conducted so as it may answer best as a preparation for the different businesses 
of life. Aug. 12, 1760. 

38. What is the best method for training to the practice of virtue ? Mr. Far- 
quhar. Dec. 9, 1760. 

39. What are the natural consequences of high national debt ; and whether, 
upon the whole, it be a benefit to a nation or not ? Dr. Gregorie. Jan. 13, 1761. 

40. Whether paper credit be beneficial to a nation or not. Dr. Skene, 
Feb. 24. 

41. What is the cause of the apparent color of the heavens ? Or what is 
properly the object to which that color can be attributed ? Principal Campbell, 
March 10. 

42. Whether the idea of cause and effect include in it any thing more than 
their constant conjunction. And, if so, what it is that it includes. Prof. Stew- 
art. March 10th and 31st. 

43. Mr. Trail. — Whether the substituting of machines instead of men's labor, 
in order to lessen the expense of labor, contributes to the populousness of a 
country. Feb. 24. 

44. Mr. Reid. — Whether moral character consists in affections, wherein the 
will is not concerned ; or in fixed habitual and constant purposes. April 15. 

45. Mr. Gordon. — Whether slavery be in all cases inconsistent with good 
government. Nov. 24. 

46. Mr. Gerard. — Whether there be any such affection in human nature as 
universal benevolence. Dec. 8. 

47. Mr. Farquhar. — Whether in writing history it be proper to mix moral and 
political reflexions or to draw characters. Dec. 8. 

48. Whence does man derive the authority which he assumes over the brutes, 
and how far does this authority extend? Mr. Beattie. Dec. 22, 1761. 

49. What are the best expedients for preventing an extravagant rise of ser- 
vants' wages, and for obliging them to bestow their labor where agriculture and 
manufactures require it. Jan. 12, 1762. Occasional question. 

50. Doctor Gregorie. — What are the good and bad effects of the provision for 
the poor by poor's rates, infirmaries, hospitals, and the like ? Feb. 9. 

51. Doctor Skene. — Whether the determination by unanimity or a majority 
injuries is most equitable. March 9. 

52. Doctor Campbell. — How far human laws can justly make alterations on 
what seems to be founded on the principles of the law of nature. March 23. 

53. Mr. Stewart. — Whether human laws be binding on the consciences of 
men. April 16. 

54. Mr. Reid. — Whether by the encouragement of proper laws the number of 
births in Great Britain might not be nearly doubled or at least greatly increased. 
June 8. 



47° APPENDIX. 

55. Mr. Thomas Gordon. — Whether the current coin of the nation ought not 
to be debased by alloy or raised in its value, so as there shall be no profit made 
by exporting it. Dec. 14. 

56. Doctor Gerard. — Whether it be best that courts of law and courts of 
equity were different, or that the same court had the power of determining 
either according to law or equity as circumstances require. Feb 22, 1763. 

57. Mr. Farquhar. — Whether justice is most effectually promoted in civil and 
criminal courts where the judges are numerous or where they are few. March 22. 

58. Mr. Beattie. — What are the advantages and disadvantages of an exten- 
sive commerce ? March 22. 

59. Dr. Gregory. — Whether the art of medicine, as it has been practised, has 
contributed to the advantage of mankind. July 12. 

60. Dr. Skene. — Whether in the same person opposite passions and affec- 
tions, such as love and hatred, resentment of injuries and benefits, always subsist 
in an equal degree of strength. Oct. 10. 

61. Dr. Campbell. — Whether any animals besides men and domestic animals 
are liable to diseases, the decay of nature and accidental hurts excepted ; and if 
they are not, whether there is any thing in the domestic life which can account for 
such diseases as men and domestic animals are obnoxious to. May 10. 

62. Mr. Stewart. — Whether or not there be a real foundation for the distinc- 
tion betwixt precepts or counsels in matters of morality. Dec. 13. 

63. Dr. Reid. — Whether every action deserving moral approbation must be 
done from a persuasion of its being morally good. Nov. 22, 1763. 

64. Mr. Thomas Gordon. — How far the profession of a soldier of fortune is 
defensible in foro conscientia. Jan. 24, 1764. 

65. Dr. Gerard. — Whether eloquence be useful or pernicious. Feb. 28, 1764. 

66. Mr. Farquhar. — What is the origin of the blacks ? March 13, 1764. 

67. Mr. Beattie. — What is that quality in objects that makes them provoke 
laughter ? March 27. 

68. Dr. George Skene. — Whether are men become degenerate in point of size 
and strength, or has the modern method of living increased the number of dis- 
eases or altered their nature ? April 9. 

69. Mr. William Ogilvy. — Whether curiosity be not the most powerful 
motive to study in the mind of youth and that which acts most uniformly. 
Nov. 27. 

70. Dr. Gregory. — What are the distinguishing characteristics of wit and 
humor ? May 8. 

71. Dr. David Skene. — Whether brutes have souls ; or, if they have, wherein 
do they differ from the human? Nov. 15. 

72. Dr. Campbell. — Whether the manner of living of parents affects the gen- 
ius or intellectual abilities of the children. Jan. 22, 1765. 

73. Mr. Stuart. — Whether the idea of an infinitely perfect Being be a good 
argument for his existence. June II, 1765. 

74. Dr. Reid. — Wherein does the nature of a promise consist, and whence 
does its obligation arise ? March 12, 1765. 

75. Mr. Thomas Gordon. — Whether there is any degeneracy of genius in the 
moderns. March 26, 1765. 

76. Dr. Gerard. — Whether children do not take more after the mother than 
the father, and if they do, what are the causes of it? Aug. 13, 1765. 

77. Mr. Farquhar. — Whether would the end of religion be most effectually 
promoted by a regular civil establishment for the support of the clergy, or by 
leaving their support to the voluntary contributions of the people ? Nov. 12. 



APPENDIX. 471 

78. What is the difference between common sense and reason ? Dec. 10, 

1765- 

79. Dr. George Skene. — Is light a body whose particles arc thrown off with 
great velocity from the luminous body, or is it a tremulous motion excited and 
propagated through a subtle medium analogous to the tremors of flies which 
occasion sound ? Dec. 9, 1766. 

80. Mr. William Ogilvie. — Suppose a legislator were to form an establish- 
ment of clergy, on what principles ought he to proceed in order to render it 
most effectual for promoting religion and morality without favoring superstition ? 
Nov. 11, 1766. 

81. Mr. Dunbar. — Whether the considerations of good policy may not some- 
times justify the laying of a restraint upon population in a state. 

82. Dr. David Skene. — What are the advantages which mankind peculiarly 
derive from the use of speech ? March 13, 1766. 

83. Dr. Campbel. — Whether it is possible that the language of any people 
should continue invariably the same, and if not, from what causes the variations 
arise. Oct. 13, 1766. 

84. Mr. Thomas Gordon. — Whether in science it ought to be an aim to in- 
crease or to diminish the number of first principles. June io, 1766. 

85. Dr. Gerard. — Whether any form of government can be perpetual. Dec. 
9, 1766. 

86. Mr. Farquhar. — Whether the observation of the unities of time and place 
are essentially requisite to the perfection of dramatic performances. Jan. 27, 
1767. 

87. Mr. Eeattie. — Whether the different opinions and different practices 
which prevail in different nations be an objection to the universality of the vir- 
tuous sentiment. Feb. 24, 1767. 

88. Dr. George Skene.- — Whether the opportunities of acquiring a learned 
education may not be too much in the power of the commonalty either for the 
advancement of learning or the good of the state. 

89. Mr. Ogilvy. — How does it appear to be equitable that the subjects of the 
state should be taxed in proportion to their respective fortunes and not equally 
over head or by any other rule ? March 24, 1767. 

90. Mr. Trail. — In what sense may virtue be said to consist in acting agree- 
ably to nature, and vice in deviating from it ? 

91. Dr. David Skene. — If mankind are considered in respect of rank and 
fortune, in what class may we expect to find the virtuous principle most preva- 
lent ? June 9, 1767. 

92. Dr. Campbel. — Whether the Greek language remained invariably the 
same so long as is commonly thought, and to what causes the duration which it 
had ought to be ascribed. Nov. 10, 1767. 

93. Mr. Goidon. — What is the province and use of metaphysics ? Dec. 8, 
T767. 

94. Dr. Gerard. — Whether poetry can be justly reckoned an imitative art; 
and, if it can, in what respects ? Jan. 26, 1768. 

95. Mr. Farquhar. — Whether the maintaining an esoteric and exoteric 
doctrine, as was practised by the ancients, is reconcilable to the principles of 
virtue. 

96. Mr. Eeattie. — Whether that superiority of understanding by which the 
inhabitants of Europe and of the countries immediately adjoining imagine them- 
selves to be distinguished may not easily be accounted for without supposing the 
rest of mankind of an inferior species. 



472 APPENDIX. 

97. Dr. George Skene. — Whether the aim of a public teacher ought to be to 
adapt his instructions to the capacities of the duller part of his audience or to 
forward the ingenious. 

98. Mr. Ogilvie. — What is that in the manners of any nation which exhibits 
it justly to the appellations of civilized or barbarous ? 

99. Mr. Dunbar. — What are the characteristics of polished language? and 
how is the comparative excellency of different languages to be estimated ? 

100. Mr. Trail. — How far may the inequalities of astronomical refraction be 
remedied by the thermometer and barometer ? 

101. Dr. David Skene. — Whether the late proceedings with respect to a 
favorite of the mob be an evidence of the corruption or of the improvement of 
our constitution. 

102. Principal Campbel. — What is the proper notion of civil liberty ? Oct. 24, 
1769. 

103. Mr. Gordon. — How far the facts relating to the burning of the Roman 
ships in the harbor of Syracuse be reconcilable to the laws of reflection and 
refraction of light. Nov. 1769. 

104. Dr. Gerard. — Whether any account can be given of the causes why great 
geniuses have arisen at the periods which have been most remarkable for them, 
and why they have frequently arisen in clusters. Dec. 12, 1769. 

105. Mr. Beattie. — Whether the use of translations can ever supersede the 
necessity of studying the Greek and Roman authors in the original languages. 
May 8, 1770. 

106. Dr. George Skene. — What is the difference between pressure and mo- 
mentum ; and how are they to be compared ? Nov. 27, 1770. 

107. Mr. Ogilvy. — Whether there may be any reason to believe that the 
friendships of this life may continue after death. 

108. Mr. Dunbar. — Whether the increasing the number of British peers tends 
to enlarge or diminish the power of the crown. March 27, 1770. 

109. Mr. Trail. — What are the desiderata in mathematics ? June 12, 1770. 
no. Occasional question proposed by Mr. Beattie. — Whether it be not for 

the advantage of mankind as moral beings that the evidence of a future state is 
rather a high probability than an absolute certainty. Oct. 9, 1769/^ 

in. Dr. David Skene. — What are the advantages and disadvantages arising 
from the different arrangements of words which obtain in the antient and modern 
languages ? 

112. Principal Campbel. — What is the best method of teaching a foreign or 
dead language ? 

113. Mr. Gordon. — How are vis inertia and weight to be distinguished, and 
in what do they agree ? 

114. Dr. Gerard. — Whether national characters depend upon physical or 
moral causes, or whether they are influenced by both. Feb. 26, 1771. 

115. Mr. Beattie. — Does it imply any absurdity or any thing inconsistent with 
the divine perfections to suppose that evil, both physical and moral, must be 
permitted to take place in a state of moral probation ? March 26, 1771. 

116. Dr. George Skene. 

117. Mr. Ogilvy. — Is there any injustice done to an impressed man, when he 
is punished according to the articles of war? March 12, 1771. 

118. Mr. Dunbar. — How are the proceedings of instinct to be distinguished 
from reason or sagacity m animals ? Feb. II, 1772. 

119. Mr. Trail. — What is the cause of the color of the heavenly bodies? 
Feb. 25, 1772. 



APPENDIX. 473 

in. Dr. Campbel. — What are the advantages and disadvantages arising from 
the different arrangements of words which obtain in the ancient and modern lan- 
guages ? 

120. Mr. Gordon. — How far is an expensive taste of living connected with 
corruption of manners and the ruin of a nation ? 

121. Dr. Gerard. — What are the ways in which watering operates in improv- 
ing land ? March 24, 1772. 

122. Dr. Beattie. — How far is versification essential to poetry ? 

123. Dr. George Skene. 

124. Mr. Ogilvy. — By what circumstances has slavery been so moderated as 
to become supportable to so many nations of mankind ? 

125. Mr. Dunbar. 

126. Mr. Trail. — Does Dr. Halley's theory of evaporation sufficiently account 
for the constant influx into the Mediterranean at the Straits of Gibraltar ? 



Art. III. MSS. Papers by Dr. Reid. lent me by Francis Edmund, Esq., 
Aberdeen {see pp. 192, 223.) 

I. Some Observations on the modem System of Materialism. This paper is in no 
fewer than five forms, showing what pains he took with it. One or two of the 
forms were notes or preparations, the other three fully written out as if to be 
read before a society. 

By the modern system of materialism he means that advanced by Dr. Priestley 
in his "Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit," 1777, and "Free Discussion 
of the Doctrines of Materialism and Philosophical Necessity," 1777. The paper 
is of a thorough and searching character, distinguished for acuteness beyond 
almost any of the published writings of Reid, and written with great point and 
naivete. It looks as if designed for publication. Chap. I. Of the Connection of 
this System with other philosophical Opinions. Here he describes the views 
entertained of substance by eminent men, criticising ably the defective views of 
Locke. Chap. I.I. Of Newton's Rules of philosophizing, showing that he had 
profoundly studied Newton. He gives fair explanations of Newton's rules. He 
shows that Priestley does not follow these rules. Chap. III. Of the Solidity or 
Impenetrability of Matter, showing there is an ambiguity in the meaning of the 
word solidity, and that Priestley has not succeeded in showing that matter is not 
solid or impenetrable. Chap. IV. Of the Inertia of Matter, showing that Priestley 
does not follow Newton. The whole is the result of much reading and reflec- 
tion. 

II. Miscellaneous Reflections on Priestley 's account of Hartley's Theory of the 
Human Mind. He shows that Hartley's views were unfounded hypotheses, but 
speaks with great fondness and respect of Hartley. He is very severe upon 
Priestley's employment of Hartley's theories, particularly upon his attempt to 
explain every mental faculty by association. He refers to Aristotle's views of 
association. He shows that association cannot account for memory, which was 
explained by the vividness of the ideas. "Every man knows what memory is, 
and every man knows what is meant by vividness of ideas or conceptions, and 
their power of suggesting one another ; and when we know and understand what 
each of these things is we can be at no loss to know whether they are one and 
the same. Let every man judge for himself whether memory is a certain degree 



474 APPENDIX. 

of vividness in ideas, and of a certain degree of strength in their power of sug- 
gesting one another. To me they appear to be things quite of a different nature ; 
and I could as easily believe that a hat is a pair of shoes as that memory is a 
certain degree of vividness in ideas and of strength in their association." "A 
malefactor that is going to be hanged has a cluster of very vivid ideas, and very 
strongly associated, of what he is about to suffer, but it is not the object of remem- 
brance but of foresight ; " or, " It appears evident, therefore, that something more 
than association of ideas is required to produce memory, and consequently that 
association is not of itself sufficient to explain or account for memory." He 
shows that association cannot account for judgment ; " for if there is a power in the 
mind of comparing ideas and of perceiving certain relations between them, such 
as those of universal concurrence and perfect coincidence, this power is not that 
of association ; for it is evident that ideas may be associated with any degree of 
strength without being compared, without perception of any relation between 
them." He shows in much the same way that association cannot account for 
the passions and volition. He shows in the same paper that Priestley's attempt 
to get Locke's ideas of reflection from sensation utterly fails. Priestley had 
said, "got by abstraction." "We would be glad to be informed by Dr. Priestley 
whether a man, when he thinks, is not conscious of his thoughts ? Whether he 
has not the power of reflecting upon his own thoughts and making them an ob- 
ject of thought," &c. 

III. On Liberty or Necessity. "The liberty of the will is a phrase similar to 
that of the liberty of speech. The last signifies not a power inherent in speech, 
but a power in the man to speak this or that. In like manner, the liberty of the 
will signifies not a power inherent in the will, but a power in man to will this or 
that." "This power is given by his Maker ; and, at his pleasure whose gift it is, 
it may be enlarged or diminished, continued or withdrawn. No power in the 
creature can be independent of the Creator. The hook is in its nose ; he can give 
it line as far as he sees fit, and when he pleases can restrain it or turn it whither- 
soever he will. Let this be always understood when we ascribe liberty to man or 
to any created being. Supposing it therefore to be true that man is a free agent, 
it may be true at the same time that his liberty may be impugned or lost by 
disorder of body or of mind, as in melancholy or in madness ; it may be impaired 
or lost by vicious habits ; it may in particular cases be restrained by divine 
interposition." He explains cause and effect, native and active power, liberty 
and necessity, standing up for efficient cause. In a fragmentary paper upon the 
same subject, perhaps a continuation : " I grant that all rational beings are influ- 
enced and ought to be influenced by motives. But the relation between a motive 
and the action is of a very different nature from the relation between an efficient 
cause and its effect. An efficient cause must be a being that exists and has 
power to produce the effect. A motive is not a thing that exists. It is only a 
thing conceived in the mind of the agent, and is what the schoolmen called an 
ens rationis, and therefore cannot possibly be the efficient cause of any thing. 
It may influence to action, but it cannot act. It is like advice or persuasion, 
which may have an influence of the same kind with that of motives ; but they leave 
the man still at liberty and indeed suppose liberty. For in vain is advice given 
if the person be not at liberty either to follow or reject it. In like manner, 
motives suppose liberty in the agent, otherwise they have no influence at all." 

IV. Of Constitution. Apparently a very old paper, not written with care for 
the press. " Every thing that is made must have some constitution, — some fabric, 
make, or nature, — from which all its qualities, appearances, powers, and operations 
do result." "It is one thing to say such a truth depends upon my constitution; 



APPENDIX. 475 

it is another thing to say that my perception of that truth depends on my consti- 
tution, and these two things ought most carefully to be distinguished." "My 
perception of every self-evident truth depends upon my constitution, and is the 
immediate effect of my constitution, and of that truth being presented to my 
mind. As soon as this truth is understood that two and two make four, I imme- 
diately assent to it, because God has given me the faculty of discerning imme- 
diately its truth, and if I had not this faculty I would not perceive this truth ; but 
it would be a true proposition still, although I did not perceive its truth. The 
truth itself therefore does not depend upon my constitution, for it was a truth 
before I had an existence, and will be a truth, although I were annihilate ; but 
my perception of it evidently depends upon my constitution, and particularly 
upon my having as a part of my constitution that faculty (whether you call it 
reason or common sense) by which I perceive or discover this truth." "If it 
should farther be inquired how far the truth of self-evident propositions depends 
on the constitution of the being that perceives them, the answer to this question 
is no less easy and obvious. As every truth expresses some attribute of a thing, 
or some relation between two or more things, the truth depends on the nature of 
the thing whose attribute is expressed. The truth of this proposition, that a lion 
is a ravenous beast, depends upon the constitution of a lion, and upon nothing 
else. The truth of this proposition, that the sun is greater than the moon, depends 
upon the magnitude of the sun and moon, and upon nothing else." In like man- 
ner as to right and wrong. "Although the rectitude or depravity has a real exist- 
ence in the agent in this case, yet it cannot be discerned by a spectator who has 
not the faculty of discerning objects of this kind." " Why do I believe first prin- 
ciples ? " " One philosopher says, Because I am so constituted that I must 
believe them. This, say some, is the only possible reason that can be given 
for the belief of first principles. But, say others, this is a very bad reason ; 
it makes truth a vague thing which depends on constitution. Is not this the 
ancient sceptical system of Heraclitus, that man is the measure of truth, that 
what is true to one man may be false to another ? How shall we judge of this 
controversy? Answer, This question admits of two meanings, i. For what 
reason do you believe first principles ? 2. To what cause is your belief of first 
principles to be ascribed ? " " To first, evidence is the sole and ultimate ground 
of belief, and self-evidence is the strongest possible ground of belief, and he who 
desires a reason for believing what is self-evident knows not what he means." To 
the second the answer is not so satisfactory. It is, " that belief is a simple and origi- 
nal operation of the mind which always accompanies a thing we call evidence." " If 
it should be asked, what this evidence is which so imperiously commands belief, 
I confess I cannot define it." " If it should farther be asked, what is the cause of 
our perceiving evidence in first principles, to this I can give no other answer 
but that God has given us the faculty of judgment or common sense." The 
paper closes thus : " Q. Is there not a difference between the evidence of some 
first principles and others ? A. There are various differences perhaps. This 
seems to be one, that, in some first principles, the predicate of the proposition is 
evidently contained in the subject : it is in this, two and three are equal to five ; 
a man has flesh and blood. In these and the like self-evident principles, the 
subject includes the predicate in the very notion of it. There are other first 
principles in which the predicate is not contained in the notion of the subject ; as, 
where we affirm that a thing which begins to exist must have a cause. Here the 
beginning of existence and causation are really different notions, nor does the 
first include the last. Again, when I affirm that the body which I see and feel 
really exists, existence is not included in the notion of a body. I can have the 



476 APPENDIX. 

notion of it as distinct when it is annihilate. The truth of principles of the first 
kind is only perceiving some part of the definition of a thing to belong to it, and 
such propositions are indeed of very little use : they may justly, as Mr. Locke 
observes, be called trifling propositions. One general maxim may include all first 
principles of this kind ; viz., Whatever is contained in the definition of a thing may 
be predicated of it. But in reality the definition sufficiently supplies the place of 
such axioms. That the sides of a square are equal, that all the radii of a circle 
are equal, these do not deserve the name of axioms ; for they are included in the 
definitions of a square and of a circle. Of the same kind are these propositions 
that an effect must have a cause, that a son must have a father. There is noth- 
ing affirmed in such propositions but what is contained in the definition or in the 
notion of the terms. There are other first principles wherein the predicate is not 
contained in the definition or notion of the subject. Of this kind is every propo- 
sition which affirms the real existence of any thing. Existence is not included in 
the notion of any thing. I " — here the paper abruptly closes. The paper is the 
dimmest and yellowest of all : looks old. Query : when written ? The whole 
paper n pages. 

V. On the Axioms of Euclid. " It seems no man pretends to define sum or differ- 
ence, or what it is to be greater or less. There are therefore some terms that 
frequently enter into mathematical reasoning, so simple as not to admit of mathe- 
matical definition. The mathematical axioms ought to be employed about 
these and only about these." 

VI. On the Muscular Motion in the Human Body. A paper worthy of consti- 
tuting a chapter in "Paley's Natural Theology," showing a thorough knowledge 
of mechanical principles, and of the physiology of his time. 

VII. Some Thoughts on the Utopian System. In this paper he seems to amuse 
himself with describing the advantages of a community without private property. 

VIII. An Essay on Quantity. Royal Society of London, Oct., 1748, and pub- 
lished in works. — " P. S. When this essay was wrote in 1748, I knew so little of 
the history of the controversy about the force of moving bodies, as to think that 
the British mathematicians only opposed the notion of Leibnitz, and that all the 
foreign mathematicians adopted it. The fact is, the British and French are of one 
side ; the Germans, Dutch, and Italians of the other. I find likewise that Desagu- 
liers, in the second volume of his course of ' Experimental Philosophy,' pub- 
lished in 1744, is of the opinion that the parties in dispute put different meanings 
upon the word force, and that in reality both are in the right when well under- 
stood." 



INDEX. 



Abbadie, 41. 

Aberdeen Philosophical Society, Art. xxvii., 
227-230 ; 202. Questions discussed, 467- 

473- 
Aberdeen Universities, 43, 92, 94, 95, 191, 

20T, 250. 
Abernethy, 63, 162. 
Abstraction and Abstract Notion, 137 (Hume), 

216 (Reid), 254 (Monboddo), 366(Mylne), 

382-383 (James Mill), 449 (Hamilton). 
Addison, 14. 
Alison, Art. xlii., 308-315, 225, 271, 280, 

283, 296, 332, 343, 387. 
Analysis, 333 (Brown), 378 (Brown and 

James Mill). 
Analytic and Synthetic Judgments, 224, 474 

(Reid).. 
Anderson, Rev. George, 177, 179. 
Anstruther, Sir William, 268. 
A priori truths, 7, 160, 213, 216, 221, 274, 

2 9 2 , 3° 6 > 3 2 °> 3 2 3> 44 8 - 
Aristotle, 22, 26, 41, 70, 136, 2x5, 221, 248, 
249, 251, 252, 292, 306, 329, 425, 438, 456, 

459- 

Arnauld, 120, 215, 254, 432, 440. 

Association of Ideas, 77 (Hutcheson), 101- 
102 (Turnbull), 135-136 (Hume), 141 
(J. S. Mill), 148 (of feelings), 216 (Reid), 
253 (Beattie), 296-297 (beauty), 309-315 
(Alison), 328-330 (Brown), 358 (Mackin- 
tosh), 366 (Mylne), 380-384 (James Mill), 
391-392 (Ballantyne), 440-441 (Hamilton). 

Arthur, Art. xxxvii., 266. 

Attention, 288 (Stewart), 366 (Mylne). 

Augustine, 78, 296, 440. 

Axioms, 72> (Hutcheson), 292,476. 

Bacon, 2, 3, 4, 26, 100, 275, 430. 
Balfour, Art. xxiv., 170, 190. 
Barbeyrac, 39. 
Baron, 93. 

Baxter (Andrew), Art. vi., 42-49, 42, 173. 
Beattie, Art. xxix., 230-238, 8, 35 (Hutche- 
son), 55, 192, 219, 280, 310, 313, 415. 



Beauty, 34 (Shaftesbury), 36, 55-77 (Hutche- 
son), 149 (Hume), 181 (Karnes), 225 
(Reid), 235 (Beattie), 252 (Monboddo), 
266, 296 (Stewart), 309-315 (Alison), 331- 
332 (Brown), 343 (Jeffrey). 

Being, 72, (Hutcheson), 139 (Hume). 

Belief, 140 (Hume), 383 (James Mill), 435 
(Hamilton). 

Bentham, 356-357, 373, 375. 

Berkeley, 13, 28, 29, 48, 55, 100, 104, 112, 
120, 136, 137, 158, 183, 184, 187, 188, 192, 
207, 211, 215, 220, 238, 262, 356. 

Blackwells, 94, 96, 195, 231. 

Blackwoods, 25. 

Blackwood's Magazine, 411-412. 

Blair, 123, 129, 178, 269-270. 

Boece, 24. 

Boston, Art. xvii., 109-110, 158. 

Boufflers, 125-128. 

Bowen's Logic, 453. 

Brougham, Art. xlvii., 360-364; 21, 283, 

3 OI >339- 
Brown, Thomas, Art. xliv., 317-337; 4, 6, 

8, 101, 193, 194, 209, 278, 283, 285, 292, 

3 6 4, 3 6 5> 3 68 , 3 8 9-39i, 4°3> 418, 421, 43 2 - 
Brown, William Lawrence, Art. xli., 307. 
Bruce, Art. xxxviii., 267. 
Brutes, 253, 254 (Monboddo), 294 (Stewart). 
Buchanan, 24, 25. 
Buckle, 6, 20. 
Buffier, 220, 226, 236, 242. 
Burgersdicius, 22. 
Burnet, Gilbert, 57, 85. 
Burns, Robert, 246, 269-271. 
Butler, 13, 15, 20, 28, 29, 35, 53, 79, 106, 

298, 328, 376. 

Cabanis, 272. 
Calderwood, 422. 
Calvin, 180, 183, 265, 401. 
Cameron, 25. 

Campbell, Archibald. Art. ix., 89-90, 161. 
Campbell, George, Art. xxx., 239-245, 55, 
228, 236, 415. 



478 



INDEX. 



Cant, Andrew, 94. 

Carlyle, Alexander, 61, 65, 123. 

Carmichael, Art. v., 36-42; 26. 

Carstairs, 24. 

Cause, 74 (Hutcheson), 142, 143 (Hume), 
145, 146, 160, 175 (Karnes), 225 (Reid), 
252 (Monboddo), 264 (James Gregory), 
266, 291 (Stewart), 320-321 (Brown), 368 
(Young), 384, 385 (James Mill), 414 (Wil- 
son), 442-446 (Hamilton). 

Chalmers, Thomas, Art. liii., 393-406; 8, 
21, 22, 87, 206, 281, 283, 322, 324, 328, 
33 2 , 337, 34 2 , 362, 365, 370, 421. 

Chalmers, William, 25. 

Cheyne, 118, 119. 

Clarke, Samuel, 7, 13, 28, 29, 42, 44, 45, 47, 
5 2 > S3, 68, 74, 85, 174, 177, 266, 363, 402. 

Cleghorn, 274. 

Coleridge, 325, 380. 

Collier, 78. 

Collins. 177. 

Common sense, 31, 97 (Turnbull), 161, 217- 
224, 242, 290, 306 (relation to faculties), 
442 (Hamilton). 

Conception, 216, 288, 381-382. 

Condillac, 3, 272, 292, 325-326, 365. 

Conscience, 34 (Shaftesbury), 79, 84, 85 
(Hutcheson), 175 (Karnes), 227 (Reid), 298 
(Stewart), 336 (Brown), 403 (Chalmers), 
387 (Mill), 431 (Hamilton). 

Consciousness, 4-6, 103 (Turnbull), 175 
(Karnes), 235 (Beattie), 242 (Campbell), 
249 (Monboddo), 288 (Stewart), 334 
(Brown), 381 (James Mill), 435-437 (Ham- 
ilton). 

Cousin, 1, 59, 159, 193, 225, 260, 267, 273, 
291, 296, 302-303, 325, 327, 405, 424, 427. 

Covenanters, 9, 92, 114, 205, 279. 

Critical Method, 273, 305-306,426 (Hamilton). 

Crombie, Art. xxxvi., 265, 266. 

Cudworth, 28, 122, 248. 

Cumberland, 178. 

Darwin, Erasmus, 319, 457. 

Darwinism, 251 (Monboddo), 273. 

Deductive Method, 100, 104, 243 (Campbell). 

D'Holbach, 272. 

Dempster, 25. 

Descartes, 3, 4, 26, 31, 40, 42, 68, 71, 120, 

192, 207, 209, 215, 273, 302, 305. 
Desires, Primary and Secondary, 75-76 

(Hutcheson), 386 (James Mill). 
Destutt de Tracy, 325-326, 334, 365. 
De Vries, 41, 42, 88, 108, 277, 327, 448. 
Donaldson, 25. 
Dreaming, 46 (Baxter), 195-197 (Reid), 280 

(Stewart). 
Drennan, 64. 



Dudgeon, Art. xviii., m-113; 161, 176. 
Duncan, Mark, 25. 
Duncan, William, Art. xiv., 107. 
Dunlop, Alexander, 60. 

Edinburgh Review, 339-341, 353> 4"> 4 2I > 

424. 
Edinburgh University, 61, 107-108, 114, 348. 
Edwards, Jonathan, 180, 183, 188, 287, 347, 

335. 37o, 40°- 
Elliott, Sir Gilbert, 130, 156. 
Elphinston. Bishop, 24. 
Emotions, 332 (Stewart), 332 (Brown), 401 

(Chalmers). 
Epicureans, 78, 251. 
Erskine, Ralph, 86-90. 
Evangelical Party, 86-88, 197, 198, 205, 270, 

393, 406, 40S. 
Evidence, 236-237 (Beattie), 242 (Campbell), 

475 (^id). 

Faith, 426, 445. 

Ferguson, Art. xxxii., 255-261, 27, 129, 156, 

270, 276, 277. 
Ferrier, 422, 437, 445. 
Fichte, 274. 
Fischer, 293. 
Forbes, of Culloden, 268. 
Forbes, John, 93. 
Fordyce, Art. xiii., 106, 107. 
France, Scotchmen in, 24. 

Gassendi, 26, 71. 

Generalization and General Notion, 137, 216 

(Reid), 254 (Monboddo), 449 (Hamilton). 
Gerard, Art. xxvi., 191-192, 55, 228. 
Glanvil, 26. 
Glasgow University, 50-51, 59, 61-63, 71, 

202-205, 410, 463-466. 
Gregory Family, 195, 263. 
Gregory, James, Art. xxxv., 264-265, 206; 

John, Art. xxxv., 263-264. 
Grote, 373-375- 
Grotius, 26, 100, 287, 355. 

Hall, Robert, 347. 

Hamilton, Art. lvii., 415-460; 4, 8, 10, 23, 
71, 95, 101, 160, 172, 209, 216, 220-224, 
248, 260, 265, 285, 286, 288, 295, 300, 
317, 322, 325, 328-331, 381, 389, 405, 
412, 414. 

Harris, 249. 

Hartley, 207, 219, 356, 457, 473. 

Hegel, 10, 274, 306, 443. 

Heineccius, 98, 108, 227. 

Helvetius, 272. 

Highlanders, 19, 63. 

Hobbes, 3, 26, 28, 55, 59, 79, 260, 335. 



INDEX. 



479 



Hogarth, 95, 96, 98. 

Holland, Scotch Youth in, 43, 245, 255, 268. 

Home, author of Douglas, 131, 186, 256. 

Horner, 21, 283, 301, 339. 

Hume, Art. xix., 113-161 ; 8, 9, 27, 35, 46, 
66, 85, 86, 102, 106, 112, 162, 164, 166, 
167, 174, 1/6, 177, 188, 190, 193, 207, 215, 
238, 240, 248, 256, 260, 273, 275, 278, 320- 

3 2I > 3 6 4, 379, 44 2 - 
Hutcheson, Art. vii., 49-86; 4, 6, 8, 22, 23, 
27, 35, 40, 86, 90, 101, 105, 106, 120. 150. 
184, 185, 188, 191, 200, 216, 224, 260, 
3*3, 384, 4i5, 436. 

Ideal Theory (of sense), 104, 105, 188 
(Witherspoon), 208-216 (Reid), 251, 334- 
335 (Brown), 344, 432 (Hamilton), 452. 

Identity, 135, 143 (Hume), 327 (Brown), 
36S (Young), 386 (James Mill). 

Impressions, 159. 

Induction, 2-1 1, 99-100, 104, 293 (Stewart), 

37«- 

Inferential Theory of Sense, 334 (Brown). 

Infinity, 74 (Hutcheson), 337 (Brown), 386 
(James Mill), 447-448 (Hamilton). 

Innes, 90. 

Instincts, 148 (Hume). 

Intellectual Powers, 71, 251 (Monboddo), 
287 (Stewart), 306 (relation to common 
sense), 335-336 (Brown), 406-407 (Aber- 
crombie), 432-442 (Hamilton). 

Intuitions, 6, 69-70 (Hutcheson), 242 (Camp- 
bell), 327, 233 (Brown), 378, 402 (Chal- 
mers), 407 (Abercrombie), 447-448 (Ham- 
ilton). 

Jackson, 112. 

Jacobi, 426. 

Jameson, 192. 

Jardine, Art. xliii., 316-317, 8, t>37i 4 2 &. 

Jeffrey, Art. xlv., 337-345 5 2 h z8 3> 2 9°\ 

301, 308, 317, 329, 411. 
Johnson, Rev. Samuel, 184. 
Jouffroy, 272, 302, 303. 
Judgment Mediate and Immediate, 40 (Car- 

michael), 72 (Hutcheson), 217 (Reid), 366 

(Mylne), 450, 451 (Hamilton). 
Justice, 151, 152, 169 (Smith), 175 (Karnes), 

227 (Reid). 

Kames, Art. xxii., 173-183; 129, 190, 206. 

Kant, 1, 6, 7, 9, 46, 138, 143, 144, 145, 146, 
158, 160, 193, 194, 201, 222, 224, 237, 273- 
274 (contrasted with Reid), 303, 304, 305 
(criticism of, by Stewart), 306, 327, 351, 
352, 366, 404, 426, 443, 454. 

King, 54. 

Knox, 24, 399. 



Laromiguierre, 272. 

Leechman, 60, 61, 65-66, 162, 465-466. 

Leibnitz, 27, 42, 74, 215, 237, 272, 306, 327, 

35 8 > 4°3, 438. 

Leland, 63, 161. 

Leslie, Sir J., 284, 320. 

Locke, 3, 4, 27, 28, 30, 31, 34, 44, 52, 75, 
84, 89, 104, 108, 120, 136, 172, 188, 192, 
207, 209-210 (ideal theory), 214, 220, 221, 
238, 248, 249, 251 (Monboddo), 268, 271, 
272, 273, 277, 278, 279 (in Scotland), 292, 
295-296 (experimental and rational), 306,^ 

33 1 , A3 2 -. 44 2 , 454- 
Logic, 23, 40 (Carmichael), 71 (Hutcheson), 
107 (Duncan), 108 (Stewart), 164 (Smith), 
185, 292, 316-317 (Jardine), 448-454 (Ham- 
ilton). 

Mackenzie, Sir George, 268. 

Mackintosh, Art. xlvi., 346-359; 21, 50, 77, 

285, 301, 403, 415. 
Macvicar, 78, 296. 
Madison, 1S7. 
Major or Mair, 24. 
Malebranche, 120, 215. 
Mandeville, 56. 
Mansel, 289, 292, 422, 454. 
Materialism, 206, 251, 473 (Reid). 
Mathematical Truths, 138 (Hume). 
Matter 45 (Baxter), 144 (Hume and John 

Stuart Mill). 
Memory, 135 (Hume), 215 (Reid), 235 

(Beattie), 365 (Mylne), 383 (James Mill), 

473 (Reid). 
Mill, James, Art. 1L, 370-388 ; 173, 283, 357, 

3 6 4, 3 6 5> 39 1 , 4 21 - 
Mill, John Stuart, 8, 133, 135, 138, 141, 144, 

146, 151, 220, 293, 335, 380, 381, 384-385, 

402, 421, 422, 460. 
Milton, 52. 
Mind, 44 (Baxter), 144 (Hume and John 

Stuart Mill). 
Miracles, 97, 146-147, 240, 332. 
Moderate Party, 17-19, 22, 52, 53, 65-66, 

83-S4, 87, 101, 106, 185-1S6, 205, 270. 
Molesworth, 39, 55. 
Molyneux, 55. 
Monboddo, (James Burnet) Art. xxxi. 245- 

254, 36, 231, 270. 
Moncrieff, Alexander, 90,91. 
Moncrieff, Sir Henry, 284, 339. 
Moor, 61, 63, 67, 463. 
Moral Philosophy, 80 (Hutcheson), 100 

(Turnbull), 188 (Witherspoon), 226 (Reid), 

401 (Chalmers). 
Moral Sense, 34 (Shaftesbury), 79 (Hutche- 
son), 85,101 (Turnbull), 150 (Hume). 
More, 2S. 



480 



INDEX. 



Morell, 295, 404,405. 

Morgan, 162. 

Motive Principles, 75-80, 147 (Hume), 226 

(Reid), 298 (Stewart), 336 (Brown), 366 

(Mylne). 
Muller, John, 433. 
Mure of Caldwell, 65, 130, 317. 
Mylne, Art. xlviii., 364-367. 
Natural Law, 41 (Carmichael), 81 (Hutche- 

son), 101 (Turnbull). 
Natural Theology, 80 (Hutcheson), 90 (A. 

Campbell), 402-403 (Chalmers). 
Necessity Philosophical, 176-178 (Karnes), 

265 (James Gregory), 266 (Crombie), 365 

(Mylne), 400 (Chalmers), 474 (Reid). 
Newton, 2, 3, 44, 47, 52. 
Nominalism, 288 (Stewart). 
Nonconformists, 15, 38, 58, 61. 
Norris, 28. 
Notion, Extension and Comprehension, 23,40, 

72, 2 [6( Reid), 331 (Brown), 449 (Hamilton). 
Number, 70 (Hutcheson). 

Observation, Method of, 2, 68, 99. 

Ogilvie, 241. 

Oswald, Art. xxviii., 229-230, 219. 

Paley, 301. 

Patronage, Law of, 17, 18, 66-67, no. 

Passions, 78, 147 (Hume). 

Phantasy, 251 (Monboddo). 

Phenomena, 139 (Kant), 160, 289. 

Phrenology, 409, 424, 459. 

Physiology, 4-5, 10, 457~459- 

Plato, 78, 248, 249, 254, 278, 296, 456. 

Playfair, 261, 269, 319. 

Porphyry, 22. 

Price, 298. 

Priestley, 206, 219, 229, 344, 473-474. 

Pringle, Art. xvii., 109. 

Probable Evidence, 103, 242. 

Puffendorf, 26, 40, 59, 79, 100. 

Quality, 289. 

Qualities, Primary and Secondary, 70 
(Hutcheson), 210 (Locke), 214 (Reid). 

Ramus, 22. 

Reason and Reasoning, 237 (Beattie), 288 
(Stewart). 

Rebellion of 1715, 39; of 1745, 86. 

Reid, Art. xxvi., 192-227, 4, 6, 8, 10, 35, 46, 
4^j 55; 95) 96, 99-100, 102, 103-105, (influ- 
ence of Turnbull), 108, 144, 145, 158, 159- 
160, 172, 188, 193, 228, 236, 248, 265, 267, 
273-274 (contrasted with Kant), 275, 278, 
279, 292, 300, 315, 322, 325, 326, 333, 378, 
395; 404, 424, 436, 443, 454, 473~476. 



Relations, 139 (Hume), 141 (John Stuart 
Mill and Bain), 330-331 (Brown), 415, 
441-442 (Hamilton). 

Relativity, 160, 216, 385-386, 442 (Hamilton), 

443-445- 

Remusat, 293, 303. 

Revolution Settlement, 16. 

Reynolds, 233. 

Riccalton, 25. 

Robertson, 123, 129, 186, 269, 281. 

Rousseau, 128. 

Royer Collard, 272, 302, 436. 

Rundle, Bishop, 98. 

Ruskin, 78, 296. 

Rutherford, 24, 92, 93. 

St. Andrews University, 23, 394. 

Saisset, 433. 

Scepticism, how to be met, 1 56-161, 302. 

Schelling, 10, 274, 303, 443. 

Scotland, State of, 11-22; North-east of, 
91-94; South-east of, 109-111; South- 
west of, 61, 63, 92. 

Scott, Sir Walter, 271, 283, 341, 412. 

Seceders, 1.8, 88, 90. 

Self-Evidence, 46 (Carmichael), 237 (Beattie), 
224, 447 (Reid). 

Self known, 289-290. 

Sensation and Perception, 211-212 (Reid). 

Sensational School, 84, 280. 

Senses, Internal, 75, 76 (Hutcheson), 84, 150. 
(Hume), 175 (Karnes), 192, 309. 

Sense Perception, 69-71 (Hutcheson), 171- 
172 (Smith), 208-216 (Reid), 368-369 
(Young), 379 (James Mill), 43 2 "435 
(Hamilton). 

Seventeenth Century, 12-16. 

Shaftesbury, Art. iv. 29-36, 41, 55, 75, 98, 
Tor, 105, 120, 150, 185, 186, 220, 221. 

Signs, Natural, 211 (Berkeley and Reid). 

Simson, John, 51-52, 59. 

Simson, Robert, 60, 63, 463. 

Smith, Adam, Art. xxi., 162-173; 8, 21, 27, 
62, 85, 129, 130, 162, 260, 275, 338, 415. 

Smith, Stanhope, 188. 

Smith, Sydney, 21, 283, 339. 

Social Affections, 78 (Hutcheson). 

Space, 47 (Baxter), 74 (Hutcheson), 137- 
138 (Hume), 213 (Hamilton), 252 (Mon- 
boddo), 262 (Hutcheson), 305 (Stewart), 
386 (James Mill), 443 (Hamilton). 

Spalding, 292. 

Spencer, Herbert, 405, 460. 

Spinoza, 112. 

Stair (Lord), 24. 

Sterling, 422. 

Stevenson, Art. xv., 107-108. 

Stewart, Art. xl., 275-307; 1, 4, 6, 8, 10, 21, 



INDEX. 



481 



2 7, 44, 95? 99- I °°, I0 3, 20 9, 220, 260, 270, 
281, 318, 319, 322, 325, 332, 339, 344, 345, 
3' 8, 388, 392, 394, 403, 415, 424, 439. 

Stillingfleet, 27. 

Stoic Philosophy, 120, 259. 

Style, 84 (Hutcheson), 122 (Hume), 163 
(Smith), 167 (Hume and Smith), 194 
(Reid), 234 (Beattie), 240 (Campbell), 
260 (Ferguson), 280, 308 (Alison), 322 
(Brown), 418-419 (Hamilton). 

Substance, 75 (Hutcheson), 136 (Hume), 289 
(Stewart), 337 (Brown), 398 (Chalmers), 
442 (Hamilton). 

Suggestion, 211 (Reid), 323 (Brown). 

Sykes, 161. 

Syllogism, 40 (Carmichael), 72 (Hutcheson), 
451-452 (Hamilton). 

Sympathy, 168-169 (Smith). 

Taste, 36, 191, 225 (Reid). 

Theism and Theistic Argument, 41-42 (Car- 
michael), 45-47 (Baxter), 175 (Karnes), 
307 (William Lawrence Brown), 332 
(Thomas Brown), 363-364 (Brougham), 
376 (James Mill), 402-403 (Chalmers), 
445-446 (Hamilton). 

Theses in Universities, 22. 

Thompson, Archbishop, 292, 453. 

Time, 47 (Baxter), 70-74 (Hutcheson), 137- 
138 (Hume), 216 (Reid and Hamilton), 
251-252 (Monboddo), 262 (Hume), 383- 
386 (James Mill), 443 (Hamilton). 

Turnbull, Art. xii., 95-106, 4, 35, 105, 135, j 
161, 195, 216, 386. j 



Tutors, Private, 43, 61, 97. 

Ulrici, 422. 

Ulster, 8, .19, 63. 

Uniformity of Nature, 291 (Stewart), 402 

(Chalmers). 
United States, 9, 183-190. 
Urquhart, 25. 
Utilitarianism, 114, 128. 

Villers, 319. 

Virtue, 33 (Shaftesbury), 80-85 (Hutcheson), 

151 (Hume), 169 (Smith), 337 (Brown), 

359 (Mackintosh). 
Voltaire, 120, 257, 295. 
Vossius, 22. 

Warburton, 125. 

Welsh, Art. lv., 408-410; 22. 

Wesley, 16. 

Whately, 243, 444-449. 

Whewell, 292, 293. 

Whitfield, 16, 65, 88, 167, 467. 

Will, 149 (Hume), 183 (Edwards), 226 
(Reid), 251 (Monboddo), 265 (James Greg- 
ory), 266 (Crombie), 336, 346, 388 (James 
Mill), 400-401 (Chalmers). 

Wilson, lvi. , 410-414; 8, 285, 322. 

Wit, 56 (Hutcheson), 236 (Beattie), 242 
(Campbell). 

Witherspoon, Art. xxiii., 183-190; 83-84. 

Wodrow, 37, 39, 59, 63. 

Wolf, 277. 

Wordsworth, 410. 



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